ess." And, in this view, I sincerely congratulate
you on your auspicious matrimonial connection. I am happy to find that
Madame de Chastellux is so intimately connected with the Duchess of
Orleans; as I have always understood that this noble lady was an
illustrious example of connubial love, as well as an excellent pattern
of virtue in general.

While you have been making love under the banner of Hymen, the great
personages in the north have been making war under the inspiration,
or rather under the infatuation, of Mars. Now, for my part, I humbly
conceive that you have acted much the best and wisest part; for
certainly it is more consonant to all the principles of reason and
religion, natural and revealed, to replenish the earth with
inhabitants than to depopulate it by killing those already in
existence. Besides, it is time for the age of knight-errantry and mad
heroism to be at an end. Your young military men, who want to reap the
harvest of laurels, do not care, I suppose, how many seeds of war are
sown; but for the sake of humanity it is devoutly to be wished, that
the manly employment of agriculture, and the humanizing benefits of
commerce, would supersede the waste of war and the rage of conquest;
that the swords might be turned into plowshares, the spears into
pruning-hooks, and, as the Scriptures express it, the "nations learn
war no more."

Now I will give you a little news from this side of the water, and
then finish. As for us, we are plodding on in the dull road of peace
and politics. We, who live in these ends of the earth, only hear of
the rumors of war like the roar of distant thunder. It is to be hoped
that our remote local situation will prevent us from being swept into
its vortex.

JOHN ADAMS

Born in 1735, died in 1826; second President of the United
States; graduated from Harvard in 1755; active in opposing
the Stamp Act; elected to the Revolutionary Congress of
Massachusetts in 1774; delegate to the first and second
Continental Congresses; proposed Washington as
commander-in-chief; signed the Declaration of Independence;
commissioner to France in 1777; to the Netherlands in 1782,
to Great Britain in 1782-83, and to Prussia; minister to
England in 1785; vice-president in 1789; elected President
in 1796; unsuccessful candidate for President in 1800; his
"Life and Works" in ten volumes published in 1850-56.

I

ON HIS NOMINAT