Religion, morality, and knowledge are necessary for good government... Therefore schools and the means of educating the people should always be encouraged.

It is my principle that the will of the majority should always prevail.

We are overdone with banking institutions, which have banished the precious metals, and substituted a more fluctuating and unsafe medium... These have withdrawn capital from useful improvements and employments to nourish idleness... These are evils more easily to be deplored than remedied.

I do most anxiously wish to see the highest degrees of education given to the higher degrees of genius and to all degrees of it, so much as may enable them to read and understand what is going on in the world and to keep their part of it going on right; for nothing can keep it right but their own vigilant and distrustful superintendence.

The true fountains of evidence [are] the head and heart of every rational and honest man. It is there nature has written her moral laws, and where every man may read them for himself.

You have not been mistaken in supposing my views and feeling to be in favor of the abolition of war. Of my dispos[i]tion to maintain peace until its condition shall be made less tolerable than that of war itself, the world has had proofs, and more, perhaps, than it has approved. I hope it is practicable, by improving the mind and morals of society, to lessen the dispos[i]tion to war; but of its abolition I despair.

My reason for fixing them in office for a term of years, rather than for life, was that they might have an idea that they were at a certain period to return into the mass of the people and become the governed instead of the governors which might still keep alive that regard to the public good that otherwise they might perhaps be induced by their independence to forget.