w obliges me to
recall you into the proper limits of your office. When nature assigned
us the same habitation, she gave us over it a divided empire. To you she
allotted the field of science; to me that of morals.

When the circle is to be squared, or the orbit of a comet to be traced;
when the arch of greatest strength, or the solid of least resistance is
to be investigated, take up the problem; it is yours; nature has given
me no cognizance of it. In like manner, in denying to you the feelings
of sympathy, of benevolence, of gratitude, of justice, of love, of
friendship, she has excluded you from their control. To these she has
adapted the mechanism of the heart. Morals were too essential to the
happiness of man, to be risked on the uncertain combinations of the
head. She laid their foundation, therefore, in sentiment, not in
science. That she gave to all, as necessary to all: this to a few only,
as sufficing with a few. I know indeed, that you pretend authority to
the sovereign control of our conduct, in all its parts: and a respect
for your grave saws and maxims, a desire to do what is right, has
sometimes induced me to conform to your counsels. A few facts, however,
which I can readily recall to your memory, will suffice to prove to you,
that nature has not organized you for our moral direction. When the poor
wearied soldier, whom we overtook at Chickahominy, with his pack on
his back, begged us to let him get up behind our chariot, you began to
calculate that the road was full of soldiers, and that if all should be
taken up, our horses would fail in their journey. We drove on therefore.
But soon becoming sensible you had made me do wrong, that though we
cannot relieve all the distressed, we should relieve as many as we can,
I turned about to take up the soldier; but he had entered a by-path,
and was no more to be found: and from that moment to this, I could never
find him out to ask his forgiveness. Again, when the poor woman came
to ask a charity in Philadelphia, you whispered, that she looked like
a drunkard, and that half a dollar was enough to give her for the
ale-house. Those who want the dispositions to give, easily find reasons
why they ought not to give. When I sought her out afterwards, and did
what I should have done at first, you know, that she employed the money
immediately towards placing her child at school. If our country, when
pressed with wrongs at the point of the bayonet, had been governed by
its