relation to a subject which the Secretary of
State will explain to you.

Accept my salutations, and assurances of esteem and consideration.

Th: Jefferson.

LETTER XXX.--TO THE EMPEROR OF RUSSIA

TO THE EMPEROR OF RUSSIA.

Washington, April 19, 1806.

I owe an acknowledgment to your Imperial Majesty, of the great
satisfaction I have received from your letter of August the 20th, 1805,
and sincere expressions of the respect and veneration I entertain for
your character. It will be among the latest and most soothing comforts
of my life, to have seen advanced to the government of so extensive a
portion of the earth, and at so early a period of his life, a sovereign,
whose ruling passion is the advancement of the happiness and prosperity
of his people; and not of his own people only, but who can extend his
eye and his good will to a distant and infant nation, unoffending in its
course, unambitious in its views.

The events of Europe come to us so late, and so suspiciously, that
observations on them would certainly be stale, and possibly wide of
their actual state. From their general aspect, however, I collect
that your Majesty's interposition in them has been disinterested and
generous, and having in view only the general good of the great
European family. When you shall proceed to the pacification which is to
re-establish peace and commerce, the same dispositions of mind will lead
you to think of the general intercourse of nations, and to make that
provision for its future maintenance, which, in times past, it has so
much needed. The northern nations of Europe, at the head of which your
Majesty is distinguished, are habitually peaceable. The United States
of America, like them, are attached to peace. We have then with them
a common interest in the neutral rights. Every nation, indeed, on the
continent of Europe, belligerent as well as neutral, is interested in
maintaining these rights, in liberalizing them progressively with the
progress of science and refinement of morality, and in relieving
them from restrictions which the extension of the arts has long since
rendered unreasonable and vexatious.

Two personages in Europe, of which your Majesty is one, have it in their
power, at the approaching pacification, to render eminent service to
nations in general, by incorporating into the act of pacification, a
correct definition of the rights of neutrals on the high seas. Such
a definition, declared by all the