The Autocrator appears in an imposing light. Fifty years ago, English writers held up terrible consequences from "thawing out the monstrous northern snake." If Cossacks, and Tartars, and Goths, and Vandals, and Huns, and Riparians, should get a taste of European sweets, what may happen? Could Wellingtons or Bonapartes resist them?
The greatest trait of sagacity that Alexander has yet exhibited to the world, is his courtship of the United States. But whether this is a mature, well-digested policy, or only a transient gleam of thought, still remains to be explained and proved by time.
The refractory siston will not give up the fisheries. Not a man here dares to hint at so base a thought.
I am very glad you have seriously read Plato; and still more rejoiced to find that your reflections upon him so perfectly harmonize with mine. Some thirty years ago I took upon me the severe task of going through all his works. With the help of two Latin translations, and one English and one French translation, and comparing some of the most remarkable passages with the Greek, I labored through the tedious toil. My disappointment was very great, my astonishment was greater, and my disgust shocking. Two things only did I learn from him. 1. That Franklin's ideas of exempting husbandmen, and mariners, &c., from the depredations of war, was borrowed from him. 2. That sneezing is a cure for the hickups. Accordingly, I have cured myself, and all my friends, of that provoking disorder, for thirty years, with a pinch of snuff.
Some parts of some of his dialogues are entertaining like the writings of Rousseau, but his laws and his republic, from which I expected most, disappointed me most.
I could scarcely exclude the suspicion that he intended the latter as a bitter satire upon all republican government, as Xenophon undoubtedly designed, by his essay on democracy, to ridicule that species of republic. In a letter to the learned and ingenious Mr. Taylor, of Haslewood, I suggested to him the project of writing a novel, in which the hero should be sent upon his travels through Plato's republic, and all his adventures, with his observations on the principles and opinions, the arts and sciences, the manners, customs, and habits of the citizens, should be recorded. Nothing can be conceived more destructive of human happiness; more infallibly contrived to transform men and women into brutes, Yahoos, or demons, than a community of wives and property. Yet in what are the writings of Rousseau and Helvetius, wiser than those of Plato? The man who first fenced a tobacco yard, and said this is mine, ought instantly to have been put to death, says Rousseau. The man who first pronounced the barbarous word _Dieu_, ought to have been immediately destroyed, says Diderot. In short, philosophers, ancient and modern, appear to me as mad as Hindoos, Mahometans, and Christians. No doubt they would all think me mad, and, for anything I know, this globe may be the bedlam, _Le Bicêtre_ of the universe. After all, as long as property exists, it will accumulate in individuals and families. As long as marriage exists, knowledge, property, and influence will accumulate in families. Your and our equal partition of intestate estates, instead of preventing, will, in time, augment the evil, if it is one.