The report was adopted on July 31, and Congress adjourned the next day. Jefferson returned at once to Monticello, to stay in Virginia until the opening of Congress. In spite of the fiery tone of the answer to Lord North's proposition, it seems that neither he nor any of his friends seriously entertained nor even considered the possibility of the colonies separating entirely from the mother country. War had already begun, but it was a civil war. There still remained some hope that an "everlasting avulsion from Great Britain would be avoided." Yet it could be avoided only on one condition: that the British Government should accept, without reservation or restriction, the minimum terms of Congress. Jefferson then wrote to his friend, John Randolph, who had decided to remove to England: I would rather be in dependence on Great Britain, properly limited, than on any nation upon earth, or than on no nation. But I am one of those, too, who, rather than submit to the rights of legislation for us, assumed by the British Parliament, and which late experience has shown they will so cruelly exercise, would lend my hand to sink the whole island in the ocean.[37] The manuscript letter in the Library of Congress is not the one that was used in the different editions of Jefferson's "Works." It is a much corrected and written-over draft, containing several passages which have disappeared in the published text.[38] It contained particularly a request to John Randolph who was going to "the hub of literature", to buy him "books of parliamentary learning." It also included a request to Randolph to sell him his fine violin, to which Randolph acceded, averring that "Tho we _may politically_ differ in sentiments, yet I see no reason, why _privately_ we may not cherish the same esteem for each other which formerly I believe subsisted between us. We both of us seem to be steering opposite courses: the success of either lies in the womb of Time."[39] Such letters are very significant, for they express better than long dissertations the state of mind of the leading men of the day. The question at issue was still a political question; it was a question of internal politics on which men could differ without necessarily becoming enemies or losing each other's esteem and affection. Less than a year before the Declaration of Independence, independence seemed to Jefferson the worst possible solution, to be delayed and avoided if it were possible. Chosen again as delegate to Congress, but delayed by the illness and death of his second child, Jefferson reached Philadelphia on September 25, twenty days after the opening of the session. He stayed only until the twenty-eighth of December, and resumed his seat on May 13 of the following year. In the meantime events were moving rapidly. Congress had been advised of the king's refusal even to notice their second petition; and Jefferson, writing a second time to John Randolph, could declare: