another, in endless succession. These are the inculcations necessary to render the people a sure basis for the structure of order and good government. But this would have been an operation of a generation or two, at least, within which period would have succeeded many Neros and Commoduses, who would have quashed the whole process. I confess then, I can neither see what Cicero, Cato, and Brutus, united and uncontrolled, could have devised to lead their people into good government, nor how this enigma can be solved, nor how further shown why it has been the fate of that delightful country never to have known, to this day, and through a course of five and twenty hundred years, the history of which we possess, one single day of free and rational government. Your intimacy with their history, ancient, middle and modern, your familiarity with the improvements in the science of government at this time, will enable you, if any body, to go back with our principles and opinions to the times of Cicero, Cato and Brutus, and tell us by what process these great and virtuous men could have led so unenlightened and vitiated a people into freedom and good government, _et eris mihi magnus Apollo. Cura ut valeas, et tibi persuadeas carissimum te mihi esse._ JOHN ADAMS TO THOMAS JEFFERSON. MONTEZILLO, December 21, 1819. DEAR SIR,--I must answer your great question of the 10th in the words of Dalembert to his correspondent, who asked him what is matter--"_Je vous avoue je ne sçais rien_." In some part of my life I record a great work of a Scotchman on the court of Augustus, in which, with much learning, hard study, and fatiguing labor, he undertook to prove that had Brutus and Cassius been conqueror, they would have restored virtue and liberty to Rome. _Mais je n'en crois rien._ Have you ever found in history one single example of a nation, thoroughly corrupted, that was afterwards restored to virtue, and without virtue there can be no political liberty. If I were a Calvinist, I might pray that God by a miracle of divine grace would instantaneously convert a whole contaminated nation from turpitude to purity; but even in this I should be inconsistent, for the fatalism of Mahometanism, Materialists, Atheists, Pantheists, and Calvinists, and church of England articles, appear to me to render all prayer futile and absurd. The French and the Dutch, in our day, have attempted reforms and revolutions. We know the results, and I fear the English reformers will have no better success.