Dedham, Thursday, December 11, 1806.
DEAR MR. QUINCY,--I received by the mail from Boston the favor of yours, covering the message. It had appeared in the Boston paper of Tuesday, which I have not seen; and unless the mail be corrected, I must ask you to send me the Boston news. We have here three mails a week, called the great mail, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, which do not stop at our little office, and on each of the other days, a little mail, which regularly fails to bring the papers in season. If my dear Seaver did but know how the poor people's bowels yearn in vain for the Chronicle, he would pity our case, and would use his influence with Granger to get "the procedure corrected." So much for the grievances of Lilliput.
The message is insipid. It is pompous inanity. While he thinks gunboats will do instead of a navy, and that a little more in the way of doing nothing to fortify our harbors will answer for the seaports, where God's chosen people are not to be found, and five hundred cavalry instead of an army, he gravely pronounces that the liberation of our revenue is "of all objects the most desirable." There is something as despicable as unsound in this sentiment. One would imagine the message was a report from George Deblois to the town of Boston, about the management and expenditures of the almshouse. The scale of his message is graduated below the politics of Sancho's government of Barataria, and is really below it. For Mr. Jefferson only takes care of his popularity, which forbids him to govern at all. The day of judgment for nations comes while sinners live. Experience will yet whip out of our flesh what folly has bred in our bone. All our notions, our prejudices, our very vanity that makes other nations fight, are unsocial and make us base and sordid. If we remain so, we cannot defend our liberty, and if we get a master, he will try to raise our spirit, because, with such slaves, he could not maintain his usurpation. I make these remarks because I seem to
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