difference, that the $1,200,000 are now paid by the people as a poll tax, the poor having as many children as the rich, and paying the whole tuition money themselves; whereas, on the proposed ward levies the poor man would pay in proportion to his hut and peculium only, which the rich would pay on their palaces and principalities. It cannot, then be that the people will not agree to have their tuition tax lightened by levies on the ward rather than on themselves; and as little believe that their "representatives" will disagree to it; for even the rich will pay less than they do now. The portion of the $180,000, which, on the ward system, they will pay for the education of the poor as well as of their own children, will not be as much as they now pay for their own alone.

And will the wealthy individual have no retribution? and what will this be? 1. The peopling his neighborhood with honest, useful and enlightened citizens, understanding their own rights and firm in their perpetuation. 2. When his own descendants became poor, which they generally do within three generations, (no law of Primogeniture now perpetuating wealth in the same families) their children will be educated by the then rich, and the little advance he now makes to poverty, while rich himself, will be repaid by the then rich, to his descendants when become poor, and thus give them a chance of rising again. This is a solid consideration, and should go home to the bosom of every parent. This will be seed sowed in fertile ground. It is a provision for his family looking to distant times, and far in duration beyond that he has now in hand for them. Let

every man count backwards in his own family, and see how many generations he can go, before he comes to the ancestor who made the fortune he now holds. Most will be stopped at the first generation, many at the 2d, few will reach the third, and not one in the state go beyond the 5th.

I know that there is much prejudice, even among the body of the people, against the expense and even the practicability of a sufficient establishment of elementary schools, but I think it proceeds from vague ideas on a subject they have never brought to the test of facts and figures; but our representatives will fathom its depths, and the people could and would do the same, if the facts and considerations belonging to the subject were presented to their minds and their subsequent as certainly as their previous approbation, would be secured.

But if the whole expense of the elementary schools, wages, subsistence and buildings are to come from the literary fund, and if we are to wait until that fund shall be accumulated to the requisite amount, we justly fear that some one unlucky legislature will intervene within the time, charge the whole appropriation to the lightening of taxes, and leave us where

we now are.

There is, however, an intermediate measure which might bring the two plans together. If the literary fund be of one and a half million of dollars, take the half million for the colleges and university, it will establish them meagrely and make a deposite of the remaining million. Its interest of $60,000 will give $50 a year to each ward, towards the teacher's

wages, and reduce the tax to 24 instead of 36 cents to the dollar; and as the literary fund continues to accumulate give one-third of the increase to the colleges and university and two-thirds to the ward schools. The increasing interest of this last portion will be continually lessening the school tax, until it will extinguish it altogether; the subsistence and buildings remaining always to be furnished by the ward in kind.

A system of general instruction, which shall reach every description of our citizens from the richest to the poorest, as it was the earliest, so will it be the latest of all the public concerns in which I shall permit myself to take an interest. Nor am I tenacious of the form in which it shall be introduced. Be that what it may, our descendants will be as wise as we are, and will know how to amend and amend it, until it shall suit their circumstances. Give it to us, then in any shape, and receive for the inestimable boon the thanks of the young and the blessings of the old, who are past all other services but prayers for the prosperity of their country and blessings for those who promote it.

TO DR. BENJAMIN WATERHOUSE

J. MSS.

MONTICELLO, March 3, 1818.

DEAR SIR, I have just received your favor of February 20th, in which you observe that Mr. Wirt, on page 47 of his Life of Patrick Henry, quotes me as saying that "Mr. Henry certainly gave the first impulse to the ball of revolution." I well recollect to

have used some such expression in a letter to him, and am tolerably certain that our own State being the subject under contemplation, I must have used it with respect to that only. Whether he has given it a more general aspect I cannot say, as the passage is not in the page you quote, nor, after thumbing over much of the book, have I been able to find it.' In page 417 there is something like it, but not the exact expression, and even there it may be doubted whether Mr. Wirt had his eye on Virginia alone, or on all the colonies. But the question, who commenced the revolution? is as difficult as that of the first inventors of a thousand good things. For example, who first discovered the principle of gravity? Not Newton; for Galileo, who died the year that Newton was born, had measured its force in the descent of gravid bodies. Who invented the Lavoiserian chemistry? The English say Dr. Black, by the preparatory discovery of latent heat. Who invented the steamboat? Was it Gerbert, the Marquis of Worcester, Newcomen, Savary, Papin, Fitch, Fulton? The fact is, that one new idea leads to another, that to a third, and so on through a course of time until some one, with whom no one of these ideas was original, combines all together, and produces what is justly called a new invention. I suppose it would be as difficult to trace our revolution to its first embryo. We do not know how long it was hatching in the British cabinet before they ventured to make the first of the experiments which were to develop it in the end and to produce complete

I It was on page 41.

parliamentary supremacy. Those you mention in Massachusetts as preceding the stamp act, might be the first visible symptoms of that design. The proposition of that act in 1764, was the first here. Your opposition, therefore, preceded ours, as occasion was sooner given there than here, and the truth, I suppose, is, that the opposition in every colony began whenever the encroachment was presented to it. This question of priority is as the inquiry would be who first, of the three hundred Spartans, offered his name to Leonidas? I shall be happy to see justice done to the merits of all, by the unexceptionable umpirage of date and facts, and especially from the pen which is proposed to be employed in it.

I rejoice, indeed, to learn from you that Mr. Adams retains the strength of his memory, his faculties, his cheerfulness, and even his epistolary industry. This last is gone from me. The aversion has been growing on me for a considerable time, and now, near the close of seventy-five, is become almost insuperable. I am much debilitated in body, and my memory sensibly on the wane. Still, however, I enjoy good health and spirits, and am as industrious a reader as when a student at college. Not of newspapers. These I have discarded. I relinquish, as I ought to do, all intermeddling with public affairs, committing myself cheerfully to the watch and care of those for whom, in my turn I have watched and cared. When I contemplate the immense advances in science and discoveries in the arts which have been made within the period of my life, I look forward with confidence to equal advances by the present generation, and