e same principles, but in a shorter compass, and more
lucid manner. But I believe this work has not been translated into our
language.

History, in general, only informs us what bad government is. But as we
have employed some of the best materials of the British constitution in
the construction of our own government, a knowledge of British history
becomes useful to the American politician. There is, however, no general
history of that country which can be recommended. The elegant one of
Hume seems intended to disguise and discredit the good principles of the
government, and is so plausible and pleasing in its style and manner,
as to instil its errors and heresies insensibly into the minds of unwary
readers. Baxter has performed a good operation on it. He has taken the
text of Hume as his ground-work, abridging it by the omission of some
details of little interest, and wherever he has found him endeavoring to
mislead, by either the suppression of a truth, or by giving it a false
coloring, he has changed the text to what it should be, so that we
may properly call it Hume's history republicanized. He has, moreover,
continued the history (but indifferently) from where Hume left it,
to the year 1800. The work is not popular in England, because it is
republican; and but a few copies have ever reached America. It is a
single quarto volume. Adding to this Ludlow's Memoirs, Mrs. Macaulay's
and Belknap's histories, a sufficient view will be presented of the free
principles of the English constitution.

To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should
be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, 'by restraining
it to true, facts and sound principles only.' Yet I fear such a paper
would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression
of the press could not more completely deprive the nation of its
benefits, than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood.
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself
becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real
extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in
situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of
the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my
fellow-citizens, who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief,
that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in
their time; whereas the accounts