republican governor, and republican legislature. Massachusetts indeed
still lags; because most deeply involved in the parricide crimes and
treasons of the war. But her gangrene is contracting, the sound flesh
advancing on it, and all there will be well. I mentioned Connecticut
as the most hopeless of our States. Little Delaware had escaped my
attention. That is essentially a Quaker State, the fragment of a
religious sect which, there, in the other States, in England, are a
homogeneous mass, acting with one mind, and that directed by the mother
society in England. Dispersed, as the Jews, they still form, as those
do, one nation, foreign to the land they live in. They are Protestant
Jesuits, implicitly devoted to the will of their superior, and
forgetting all duties to their country in the execution of the policy
of their order. When war is proposed with England, they have religious
scruples; but when with France, these are laid by, and they become
clamorous for it. They are, however, silent, passive, and give no other
trouble than of whipping them along. Nor is the election of Monroe an
inefficient circumstance in our felicities. Four and twenty years,
which he will accomplish, of administration in republican forms and
principles, will so consecrate them in the eyes of the people as
to secure them against the danger of change. The evanition of party
dissensions has harmonized intercourse, and sweetened society beyond
imagination. The war then has done us all this good, and the further one
of assuring the world, that although attached to peace from a sense of
its blessings, we will meet war when it is made necessary.

I wish I could give better hopes of our southern brethren. The
achievement of their independence of Spain is no longer a question. But
it is a very serious one, what will then become of them. Ignorance and
bigotry, like other insanities, are incapable of self-government. They
will fall under military despotisms, and become the murderous tools of
the ambition of their respective Bonapartes; and whether this will be
for their greater happiness, the rule of one only has taught you to
judge. No one, I hope, can doubt my wish to see them and all mankind
exercising self-government, and capable of exercising it. But the
question is not what we wish, but what is practicable. As their sincere
friend and brother, then, I do believe the best thing for them, would be
for themselves to come to an accord with Spain, under