erance of scribblers; but that you may
continue in tranquillity to live and to rejoice in the prosperity of
our country, until it shall be your own wish to take your seat among the
_aristoi_ who have gone before you.

Ever and affectionately yours.

Th: Jefferson.

LETTER CXVI.--TO THOMAS LIEPER, January 1, 1814

TO THOMAS LIEPER.

Monticello, January 1, 1814.

Dear Sir,

I had hoped, when I retired from the business of the world, that I
should have been permitted to pass the evening of life in tranquillity,
undisturbed by the peltings and passions of which the public papers
are the vehicles. I see, however, that I have been dragged into the
newspapers by the infidelity of one with whom I was formerly intimate,
but who has abandoned the American principles out of which that intimacy
grew, and become the bigoted partisan of England, and malcontent of his
own government. In a letter which he wrote me, he earnestly besought me
to avail our country of the good understanding which subsisted between
the executive and myself, by recommending an offer of such terms to
our enemy as might produce a peace, towards which he was confident that
enemy was disposed. In my answer, I stated the aggressions, the insults,
and injuries which England had been heaping on us for years, our long
forbearance in the hope she might be led by time and reflection to a
sounder view of her own interests, and of their connection with justice
to us, the repeated propositions for accommodation made by us, and
rejected by her, and at length her Prince Regent's solemn proclamation
to the world, that he would never repeal the orders in council as to
us, until France should have revoked her illegal decrees as to all
the world, and her minister's declaration to ours, that no admissible
precaution against the impressment of our seamen could be proposed: that
the unavoidable declaration of war which followed these was accompanied
by advances for peace, on terms which no American could dispense with,
made through various channels, and unnoticed and unanswered through
any: but that if he could suggest any other conditions which we ought
to accept, and which had not been repeatedly offered and rejected, I was
ready to be the channel of their conveyance to the government: and, to
show him that neither that attachment to Bonaparte nor French influence,
which they allege eternally without believing it, themselves, affected
my mind, I threw in the two