The fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follow that, and in its turn wretchedness and oppression.

Required to be constantly recumbent I write slowly and with difficulty.... Weakened in body by infirmities and in mind by age, now far gone into my 83rd year, reading one newspaper only and forgetting immediately what I read.

The Habeas Corpus secures every man here, alien or citizen, against everything which is not law, whatever shape it may assume.

I, place economy among the first & most important republican virtues, & public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared

The rights of the people to the exercise and fruits of their own industry can never be protected against the selfishness of rulers not subject to their control at short periods.

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.

I am myself an empiric in natural philosophy, suffering my faith to go no further than my facts. I am pleased, however, to see the efforts of hypothetical speculation, because by the collisions of different hypotheses, truth may be elicited and science advanced in the end.