g spirit of internal
improvement prevailing in the States. The opinion I have ever expressed
of the advantages of a western communication through the James River, I
still entertain; and that the Cayuga is the most promising of the links
of communication.

The history of our University you know so far. Seven of the ten
pavilions destined for the Professors, and about thirty dormitories,
will be completed this year, and three others, with six hotels for
boarding, and seventy other dormitories, will be completed the next
year, and the whole be in readiness then to receive those who are to
occupy them. But means to bring these into place, and to set the machine
into motion, must come from the legislature. An opposition, in the mean
time, has been got up. That of our alma mater, William and Mary, is not
of much weight. She must descend into the secondary rank of academies of
preparation for the University. The serious enemies are the priests of
the different religious sects, to whose spells on the human mind
its improvement is ominous. Their pulpits are now resounding with
denunciations against the appointment of Doctor Cooper, whom they charge
as a monotheist in opposition to their tritheism. Hostile as these sects
are, in every other point, to one another, they unite in maintaining
their mystical theogony against those who believe there is one God only.
The Presbyterian clergy are loudest; the most intolerant of all sects,
the most tyrannical and ambitious; ready at the word of the lawgiver, if
such a word could be now obtained, to put the torch to the pile, and
to rekindle in this virgin hemisphere the flames in which their oracle
Calvin consumed the poor Servetus, because, he could not find in his
Euclid the proposition which has demonstrated that three are one, and
one is three, nor subscribe to that of Calvin, that magistrates have
a right to exterminate all heretics to Calvinistic creed. They pant to
re-establish, by law, that holy inquisition, which they can now only
infuse into public opinion. We have most unwisely committed to the
hierophants of our particular superstition the direction of public
opinion, that lord of the universe. We have given them stated and
privileged days to collect and catechize us, opportunities of delivering
their oracles to the people in mass, and of moulding their minds as
wax in the hollow of their hands. But in despite of their fulminations
against endeavors to enlighten the general min