“I believe ’tis nearly ten days since I wrote you a line. I have not felt in a humor to entertain you. If I had taken up my pen, perhaps some unbecoming invective might have fallen from it. The eyes of our rulers have been closed and a lethargy has seized almost every member. I fear a fatal security has taken possession of them. While the building is in flames they tremble at the expense of water to quench it. In short, two months have elapsed since the evacuation of Boston, and very little has been done in that time to secure it, or the harbor, from future invasion. The people are all in a flame, and no one among us, that I have heard of, even mentions expense. They think, universally, that there has been an amazing neglect somewhere. “’Tis a maxim of state that ‘power and liberty are like heat and moisture; where they are well mixed everything prospers; where they are single they are destructive!’ “A government of more stability is much wanted in this colony, and they are ready to receive it at the hands of Congress. “And since I have begun with maxims of state, I will add another, namely, that a people may let a king fall yet still remain a people; but if a king let his people slip from him he is no longer a king. And as this is most certainly our case, why not proclaim to the world, in decisive terms, your own importance? Shall we not be despised by foreign powers for hesitating so long at a word?” To this Mr. Adams replied: “PHILADELPHIA, _May 27, 1776_. “I think you shine as a statesman, of late, as well as a farmeress. Pray where do you get your maxims of state? They are very apropos.” All history shows how long the conception of a plan, in some acute mind, precedes the popular impulse toward it. The fertile mind of Daniel De Foe, in an “Essay on Projects,” published in 1699, suggests the plan of an Academy of Music, with hints for cheap Sunday concerts, an Academy for Military Science and Practice, and an Academy for Women. This is the earliest project for a school of this grade, for women, and remained the only one for more than a century in England. In America, from the middle of the eighteenth century, academies were established in many towns where the law requiring instruction to fit boys for the university did not apply. Some of these opened their doors to girls, and, in a few instances, seminaries and academies for young ladies were founded, and, once inaugurated, they multiplied with constantly accelerating speed. A contemporary of these events, writing as “Senex” in “The American Journal of Education,” says: “When at length academies were opened for female improvement in the higher branches, a general excitement appeared in parents, and an emulation in daughters to attend them. The love of reading and habits of application became fashionable.”