and anarchy.
And to this he listened the more easily, from my known disapprobation
of the British treaty. I never saw him afterwards, or these malignant
insinuations should have been dissipated before his just judgment, as
mists before the sun. I felt on his death, with my countrymen, that
'verily a great man hath fallen this day in Israel.'

More time and recollection would enable me to add many other traits of
his character; but why add them to you, who knew him well? And I cannot
justify to myself a longer detention of your paper.

_Vale, proprieque tuum me esse tibi persuadeas_.

Th: Jefferson.

LETTER CXVIII.--TO JOSEPH C. CABELL, January 31, 1814

TO JOSEPH C. CABELL.

Monticello, January 31, 1814.

Dear Sir,

Your favor of the 23d is received. Say had come to hand safely. But I
regretted having asked the return of him; for I did not find in him one
new idea on the subject I had been contemplating; nothing more than a
succinct, judicious digest of the tedious pages of Smith.

You ask my opinion on the question, whether the States can add any
qualifications to those which the constitution has prescribed for their
members of Congress? It is a question I had never before reflected on;
yet had taken up an off-hand opinion, agreeing with your first,
that they could not: that to add new qualifications to those of the
constitution, would be as much an alteration, as to detract from them.
And so I think the House of Representatives of Congress decided in some
case; I believe that of a member from Baltimore. But your letter having
induced me to look into the constitution, and to consider the question
a little, I am again in your predicament, of doubting the correctness of
my first opinion. Had the constitution been silent, nobody can doubt but
that the right to prescribe all the qualifications and disqualifications
of those they would send to represent them, would have belonged to the
State. So also the constitution might have prescribed the whole, and
excluded all others. It seems to have preferred the middle way. It has
exercised the power in part, by declaring some disqualifications, to
wit, those of not being twenty-five years of age, of not having been a
citizen seven years, and of not being an inhabitant of the State at the
time of election. But it does not declare, itself, that the member shall
not be a lunatic, a pauper, a convict of treason, of murder, of felony,
or other infamous crime, or a non-