ccur to you without enumeration. I
should not apprehend them, if all was sound within. But there is a most
respectable part of our State who have been enveloped in the X. Y. Z.
delusion, and who destroy our unanimity for the present moment. This
disease of the imagination will pass over, because the patients are
essentially republicans. Indeed, the Doctor is now on his way to cure
it, in the guise of a tax-gatherer. But give time for the medicine
to work, and for the repetition of stronger doses, which must be
administered. The principle of the present majority is excessive
expense, money enough to fill all their maws, or it will not be worth
the risk of their supporting. They cannot borrow a dollar in Europe, or
above two or three millions in America. This is not the fourth of the
expenses of this year, unprovided for. Paper money would be perilous
even to the paper men. Nothing then but excessive taxation can get us
along: and this will carry reason and reflection to every man's door,
and particularly in the hour of election.

I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our
constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the
reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine
principles of its constitution; I mean an additional article, taking
from the federal government the power of borrowing. I now deny their
power of making paper money or any thing else a legal tender. I know
that to pay all proper expenses within the year, would, in case of war,
be hard on us. But not so hard as ten wars instead of one. For wars
would be reduced in that proportion; besides that the State governments
would be free to lend their credit in borrowing quotas. For the present,
I should be for resolving the alien and sedition laws to be against the
constitution and merely void, and for addressing the other States to
obtain similar declarations; and I would not do any thing at this moment
which should commit us further, but reserve ourselves to shape our
future measures or no measures, by the events which may happen. It is a
singular phenomenon, that while our State governments are the very best
in the world, without exception or comparison, our General Government
has, in the rapid course of nine or ten years, become more arbitrary,
and has swallowed more of the public liberty, than even that of England.
I enclose you a column, cut out of a London paper, to show you that the
English, though charmed wi