MY DEAR SIR:--I know how precious your time is, and how exclusively you devote it to the duties of your office, yet I venture to ask a few hours or minutes of it on motives of public service, as well as private friendship. I will explain the occasion of the application. You recollect enough of the old Congress to remember that their mode of managing the business of the House was not only unparliamentary, but that the forms were so awkward and inconvenient that it was impossible sometimes to get at the true sense of the majority. The House of Representatives of the United States are now pretty much in the same situation. In the Senate it is in our power to get into a better way; our ground is this: The Senate have established a few rules for their government, and have subjected the decisions on these and on _all other points of order_ without debate, and without appeal, to the judgment of their President, he, for his own sake, as well as theirs, must prefer recurring to some system of rules ready formed; and there can be no question that the Parliamentary rules are the best known to us for managing the debates, and obtaining the sense of a deliberative body. I have therefore made them my rule of decision, rejecting those of the old Congress altogether, and it gives entire satisfaction to the Senate; insomuch that we shall not only have a good system there, but probably, by the example of its effects, produce a conformity in the other branch. But in the course of this business I find perplexities, having for twenty years been out of deliberative bodies, and become rusty as to many points of proceeding; and so little has the Parliamentary branch of the law been attended to, that I not only find no person here, but not even a book to aid me. I had, at an early period of life, read a good deal on the subject, and common-placed what I read. This common-place has been my pillar; but there are many questions of practice on which that is silent, some of them are so minute indeed, and belong too much to every-day's practice, that they have never been thought worthy of being written down, yet from desuetude they have slipped my memory. You will see by the enclosed paper what they are. I know with what pain you write: therefore I have left a margin in which you can write a simple negative or affirmative opposite every position, or perhaps, with as little trouble, correct the text by striking out or interlining. This is what I have earnestly to solicit from you, and I would not have given you the trouble if I had had any other resource. But you are, in fact, the only spark of Parliamentary science now remaining to us. I am the more anxious, because I have been forming a manual of Parliamentary law which I mean to