I wish I was a despot that I might save the noble, the beautiful trees that are daily falling sacrifice to the cupidity of their owners, or the necessity of the poor. The unnecessary felling of a tree, perhaps the growth of centuries, seems to me a crime little short of murder.

The remaining revenue on the consumption of foreign luxuries to domestic comforts, being collected on our seaboard and frontiers only, and incorporated with the transactions of our mercantile citizens, it may be the pleasure and the pride of an American to ask, What farmer, what merchant, what laborer ever sees a tax gatherer of the United States?

I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self evident, "that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living": that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.

Independence can be trusted nowhere but with the people in mass. They are inherently independent of all but moral law.

The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state.

Still less let it be proposed that our properties within our own territories shall be taxed or regulated by any power on earth but our own.

No man has done everything he can who has done only his best.