ols, it is not in my
power to give an answer. Age, debility, an ancient dislocated, and now
stiffened wrist, render writing so slow and painful, that I am obliged
to decline every thing possible requiring writing. An act of our
legislature will inform you of our plan of primary schools, and the
annual reports show that it is becoming completely abortive, and must
be abandoned very shortly, after costing us to this day one hundred and
eighty thousand dollars, and yet to cost us forty-five thousand dollars
a year more until it shall be discontinued; and if a single boy has
received the elements of common education, it must be in some part of
the country not known to me. Experience has but too fully confirmed the
early predictions of its fate. But on this subject I must refer you
to others more able than I am to go into the necessary details; and I
conclude with the assurances of my great esteem and respect.

Th: Jefferson.

LETTER CLXV.--TO DOCTOR WATERHOUSE, July 19, 1822

TO DOCTOR WATERHOUSE.

Monticello, July 19, 1822.

Dear Sir,

An anciently dislocated, and now stiffening wrist, makes writing an
operation so slow and painful to me, that I should not so soon have
troubled you with an acknowledgment of your favor of the 8th, but for
the request it contained of my consent to the publication of my letter
of June the 26th. No, my dear Sir, not for the world. Into what a nest
of hornets would it thrust my head! the _genus irritabile vatum_, on
whom argument is lost, and reason is, by themselves, disclaimed in
matters of religion. Don Quixote undertook to redress the bodily
wrongs of the world, but the redressment of mental vagaries would be an
enterprise more than Quixotic. I should as soon undertake to bring the
crazy skulls of Bedlam to sound understanding, as inculcate reason into
that of an Athanasian. I am old, and tranquillity is now my _summum
bonum_. Keep me, therefore, from the fire and faggots of Calvin and his
victim Servetus. Happy in the prospect of a restoration of primitive
Christianity, I must leave to younger athletes to encounter and lop off
the false branches which have been engrafted into it by the mycologists
of the middle and modern ages. I am not aware of the peculiar resistance
to Unitarianism, which you ascribe to Pennsylvania. When I lived in
Philadelphia there was a respectable congregation of that sect, with a
meeting-house and regular service which I attended, and in which Docto