General education is the best preventive of the evils now most dreaded. In the civilized countries of the world, the question is how to distribute most generally and equally the property of the world. As a rule, where education is most general the distribution of property is most general.... As knowledge spreads, wealth spreads. To diffuse knowledge is to diffuse wealth. To give all an equal chance to acquire knowledge is the best and surest way to give all an equal chance to acquire property.

For character, to prepare for the inevitable I recommend selections from [Ralph Waldo] Emerson. His writings have done for me far more than all other reading.

Personally I do not resort to force - not even the force of law - to advance moral reforms. I prefer education, argument, persuasion, and above all the influence of example - of fashion.

Law without education is a dead letter. With education the needed law follows without effort and, of course, with power to execute itself; indeed, it seems to execute itself.

[T]his free and easy old-bachelor sort of life is quite full of fun and jollity. Pease and myself room together; and everything like order and neatness is banished from our presence as a nuisance--old letters and old boots and shoes, duds clean and duds dirty, books and newspapers, tooth-brushes, shoe-brushes, and clothes-brushes, all heaped together on chairs, settees, etc., in dusty and "most admired confusion." Now, what is there imaginable in clean, tidy private life equal to this?

We people in camp are merely big children, wayward and changeable.

One thing you may be sure of, I was not a party to covering up anything.