mer, whilst it encourages us to proceed,
may help to improve us in our progress.

Some of the errors you point out to me in my printed letter are really
such. One only I find to be material. It is corrected in the edition
which I take the liberty of sending to you. As to the cavils which may
be made on some part of my remarks with regard to the _gradations_ in
your new Constitution, you observe justly that they do not affect the
substance of my objections. Whether there be a round more or less in the
ladder of representation by which your workmen ascend from their
parochial tyranny to their federal anarchy, when the whole scale is
false, appears to me of little or no importance.

I published my thoughts on that Constitution, that my countrymen might
be enabled to estimate the wisdom of the plans which were held out to
their imitation. I conceived that the true character of those plans
would be best collected from the committee appointed to prepare them. I
thought that the scheme of their building would be better comprehended
in the design of the architects than in the execution of the masons. It
was not worth my reader's while to occupy himself with the alterations
by which bungling practice corrects absurd theory. Such an investigation
would be endless: because every day's past experience of
impracticability has driven, and every day's future experience will
drive, those men to new devices as exceptionable as the old, and which
are no otherwise worthy of observation than as they give a daily proof
of the delusion of their promises and the falsehood of their
professions. Had I followed all these changes, my letter would have been
only a gazette of their wanderings, a journal of their march from error
to error, through a dry, dreary desert, unguided by the lights of
Heaven, or by the contrivance which wisdom has invented to supply their
place.

I am unalterably persuaded that the attempt to oppress, degrade,
impoverish, confiscate, and extinguish the original gentlemen and landed
property of a whole nation cannot be justified under any form it may
assume. I am satisfied beyond a doubt, that the project of turning a
great empire into a vestry, or into a collection of vestries, and of
governing it in the spirit of a parochial administration, is senseless
and absurd, in any mode or with any qualifications. I can never be
convinced that the scheme of placing the highest powers of the state in
church-wardens and constables