long as I breathe, the public education and the
subdivision of the counties into wards. I consider the continuance of
republican government as absolutely hanging on these two hooks. Of the
first, you will, I am sure, be an advocate, as having already
reflected on it, and of the last, when you shall have reflected. Ever
affectionately yours.

Th: Jefferson.

LETTER CXIX.--TO JOHN ADAMS, July 5, 1814

TO JOHN ADAMS.

Monticello, July 5, 1814

Dear Sir,

Since mine of January the 24th, yours of March the 14th has been
received. It was not acknowledged in the short one of May the 18th, by
Mr. Rives, the only object of that having been to enable one of our most
promising young men to have the advantage of making his bow to you. I
learned with great regret the serious illness mentioned in your letter;
and I hope Mr. Rives will be able to tell me you are entirely restored.
But our machines have now been running seventy or eighty years, and we
must expect that, worn as they are, here a pivot, there a wheel, now
a pinion, next a spring, will be giving way; and however we may tinker
them up for a while, all will at length surcease motion. Our watches,
with works of brass and steel, wear out within that period. Shall you
and I last to see the course the seven-fold wonders of the times will
take? The Attila of the age dethroned, the ruthless destroyer of
ten millions of the human race, whose thirst for blood appeared
unquenchable, the great oppressor of the rights and liberties of
the world, shut up within the circuit of a little island of the
Mediterranean, and dwindled to the condition of an humble and degraded
pensioner on the bounty of those he has most injured. How miserably, how
meanly, has he closed his inflated career! What a sample of the bathos
will his history present! He should have perished on the swords of his
enemies, under the walls of Paris.

[Illustration: page240]

But Bonaparte was a lion in the field only. In civil life, a
cold-blooded, calculating, unprincipled usurper, without a virtue; no
statesman, knowing nothing of commerce, political economy, or civil
government, and supplying ignorance by bold presumption. I had supposed
him a great man until his entrance into the Assembly _des Cinq Cens_,
eighteenth _Brumaire_ (an 8.) From that date, however, I set him down as
a great scoundrel only. To the wonders of his rise and fall, we may add
that of a Czar of Muscovy, dictating, in Paris, laws a