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.

No man, however benevolent, liberal, and wise, can use a large fortune so that it will do half as much good in the world as it would if it were divided into moderate sums and in the hands of workmen who had earned it by industry and frugality. The piling up of estates often does great and conspicuous good.... But no man does with accumulated wealth so much good as the same amount would do in many hands.

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.

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

My father and mother in 1817 were forty-nine days on the road with their emigrant wagons [from Vermont] to Ohio. More than two days for each hour that I spent in the same journey.

[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?

The ex-Presidential situation has its advantages, but with them are certain drawbacks. The correspondence is large. The meritorious demands on one are large. More independent out than in place, but still something of the bondage of the place that was willingly left. On the whole, however, I find many reasons to be content.