7,1816.

Dear Sir,

I received a few-days ago from Mr. Dupont the enclosed manuscript, with
permission to read it, and a request, when read, to forward it to
you, in expectation that you would translate it. It is well worthy of
publication for the instruction of our citizens, being profound, sound,
and short. Our legislators are not sufficiently apprized of the rightful
limits of their powers: that their true office is to declare and enforce
only our natural rights and duties, and to take none of them from us.
No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights
of another; and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him:
every man is under the natural duty of contributing to the necessities
of the society; and this is all the laws should enforce on him: and, no
man having a natural right to be the judge between himself and another,
it is his natural duty to submit to the umpirage of an impartial third.
When the laws have declared and enforced all this, they have fulfilled
their functions, and the idea is quite unfounded, that on entering into
society we give up any natural right. The trial of every law by one
of these texts, would lessen much the labors of our legislators, and
lighten equally our municipal codes. There is a work of the first
order of merit now in the press at Washington, by Destutt Tracy, on the
subject of political economy, which he brings into the compass of three
hundred pages, octavo. In a preliminary discourse on the origin of the
right of property, he coincides much with the principles of the present
manuscript; but is more developed, more demonstrative. He promises a
future work on morals, in which I lament to see, that he will adopt the
principles of Hobbes, or humiliation to human nature; that the sense of
justice and injustice is not derived from our natural organization,
but founded on convention only. I lament this the more, as he is
unquestionably the ablest writer living, on abstract subjects. Assuming
the fact, that the earth has been created in time, and consequently the
dogma of final causes, we yield, of course, to this short syllogism.
Man was created for social intercourse; but social intercourse cannot be
maintained without a sense of justice; then man must have been created
with a sense of justice. There is an error into which most of the
speculators on government have fallen, and which the well known state
of society of our Indians ought, before now, to