appear in his published works. Those that are before us contain more expressions of suspicions of surveillance and inspection on the part of the post-office than of opinions on the situation. His general views are, however, sufficiently well known. He wholly opposed the course the government was pursuing, but deplored any thought of violent measures, arguing very forcibly in a letter to John Taylor of Carolina,[1] that men were prone to differ, parties were inevitable, and the constant rule of either party impossible; that, therefore to consider secession and separate existence with North Carolina alone, as suggested by him, was to flee from the evil without escaping it; that one might thus continue to divide and subdivide and yet never attain the desired goal. At the same time he recognized the importance, even the imperative necessity, especially for party purposes, of prompt action, and soon came to share the opinion of those who thought that the legislatures should be made the mouth-pieces of their protests. In a less pleasing tone he wrote to S. T. Mason[2]: "The Alien and Sedition laws are working hard. I fancy that some of the State legislatures will take strong ground on this occasion. For my own part I consider those laws as only an experiment on the American mind to see how far it will bear an avowed violation of the Constitution. If this goes down, we shall immediately see attempted another act of Congress declaring that the President shall
