This is a plain question, and one may well wonder how it was possible for you to suppose that you were fairly meeting it and effectually rebutting the charge it implies by raising the distinction you make between the Government and the Administration. The sense in which Mr. Crosby used the word Government is perfectly obvious; and if he had a right to use it in that sense--as he undoubtedly had--it seems to me it was for you to answer it in its plain meaning; to answer the question he asked, and not another, which he did not ask. But you preferred to go into critical analysis and to make sharp distinctions of words. Let us look at the work you have made of it. You tell Mr. Crosby that he has 'fallen into the prevalent error of confounding the Government with the Administration of the Government,' and that 'they are not the same.' Now, they _are_ the same, when both words are used to signify the same thing. You say that 'the word government has, indeed, two meanings.' Webster gives a round dozen. In its political applications it has four. You add, 'In order to relieve the subject from ambiguity'--though there is in this case no ambiguity to relieve--'that the ordinary meaning of government in free countries is that form of fundamental rules and principles by which a nation or state is governed,' etc. No doubt this is one of the meanings of the word. No doubt government, considered with reference to its quality or the manner of its constitution, does often signify a system of polity, a determinate organization and distribution of the supreme powers of the state. But this is not its '_ordinary_' meaning--either in the sense of its being the most correct and proper, or the most frequent use of the term. The other meaning to which you refer--that which makes it 'synonymous with the administration of public affairs'--is equally legitimate, and a great deal more frequent. The word not only '_sometimes_' has this meaning, but has it, I presume to say, ten times oftener than it has what you call its 'ordinary meaning,' and for the sufficient reason that there is occasion to speak ten times of Government as an actual exercise of the supreme powers where there is to speak of it once as an abstract system of polity. But you say that when the word is used in 'a meaning synonymous with administration of public affairs, then '_the Government_' is metonymically used for _administration_, and should not be confounded with the original and true signification of the term _Administration_, which means the _persons collectively_ who are intrusted with the execution of the laws, and with the superintendence of public affairs.'