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LETTER CLXXXIX.--TO F. HOPKINSON, March 13, 1789

TO F. HOPKINSON.

Paris, March 13, 1789.

Dear Sir,

Since my last, which was of December the 21st, yours of December the
9th and 21st are received. Accept my thanks for the papers and pamphlets
which accompanied them, and mine and my daughters for the book of songs.
I will not tell you how much they have pleased us, nor how well the last
of them merits praise for its pathos, but relate a fact only, which
is, that while my elder daughter was playing it on the harpsichord, I
happened to look towards the fire, and saw the younger one all in
tears. I asked her if she was sick? She said, 'No; but the tune was so
mournful.'

The Editor of the _Encyclopedie_ has published something as to an
advanced price on his future volumes, which, I understand, alarms the
subscribers. It was in a paper which I do not take, and therefore I have
not yet seen it, nor can I say what it is. I hope that by this time
you have ceased to make wry faces about your vinegar, and that you have
received it safe and good. You say that I have been dished up to you
as an anti-federalist, and ask me if it be just. My opinion was never
worthy enough of notice, to merit citing; but since you ask it, I will
tell it to you. I am not a federalist, because I never submitted the
whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever,
in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in any thing else, where
I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last
degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but
with a party, I would not go there at all. Therefore, I protest to you,
I am not of the party of federalists. But I am much farther from that
of the anti-federalists. I approved, from the first moment, of the
great mass of what is in the new constitution; the consolidation of the
government; the organization into executive, legislative, and judiciary;
the subdivision of the legislative; the happy compromise of interests
between the great and little States, by the different manner of voting
in the different Houses; the voting by persons instead of States; the
qualified negative on laws given to the executive, which, however, I
should have liked better if associated with the judiciary also, as in
New York; and the power of taxation. I thought at first that the latter
might have been limited. A little reflection soon convinced me it ought
not to be.