South, who compared notes, engaged in discussion and debates, and formed results by one vote, and by two votes, which went out to the world as unanimous.

Apart from the endless religious broadsides, the other great fun and business of the letters began when Adams started the discussion as to living their lives over again:

I cannot be serious? I am about to write you the most frivolous letter you ever read. Would you go back to your cradle and live over again your seventy years? I believe you would return me a New England answer, by asking me another question: Would you live your eighty years over again?

I am not prepared to give you an explicit answer; the question involves so many considerations of metaphysics and physics, of experience and romance, of tragedy, comedy, and farce, that I would not give my opinion without writing a volume to justify it.

Jefferson in his turn was more immediately definite:

You ask, if I would agree to live my seventy or rather seventy-three years over again? To which I say Yea. I think, with you, that it is a good world on the whole; that it has been formed on a principle of benevolence, and more pleasure than pain dealt out to us. There are, indeed (who might say nay), gloomy and hypochondriac minds, inhabitants of diseased bodies, disgusted with the present and despairing of the future; always counting that the worst will happen, because it may happen. To these I say, How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened! My temperament is sanguine. I steer my bark with Hope in the head, leaving Fear astern. My hopes, indeed, sometimes fail; but not oftener than the forebodings of the gloomy. There are, I acknowledge, even in the happiest life, some terrible convulsions, heavy set-offs against the other page of the account. I have often wondered for what good end the sensations of grief could be intended. All our other passions, within proper bounds, have an useful object. And the perfection

of the moral character is not in stoical apathy, so hypocritically vaunted and so untruly too, because impossible, but in a just equilibrium of all the passions. I wish the pathologists then would tell us what is the use of grief in the economy, and of what good it is the cause, proximate or remote.

Before Adams took up the latter question of grief, which he reserved for a special letter, he paid his addresses to the first inquiry, which he had started, and he put his letter in the form of a dialogue:

J. Would you agree to live your eighty years over again?

A.

J. Would you agree to live your eighty years over again forever?

A. I once heard our acquaintance, Chew, of Philadelphia, say he would like to go back to twenty-five, to all eternity; but I own my soul would start and shrink back on itself at the prospect of an endless succession of boules de savon, vanity of vanities, an eternal succession of which would terrify me almost as much as annihilation.

J. Would you prefer to live over again, rather than accept the offer of a better life in a future state?

A. Certainly not.

J. Would you live over again rather than change for the worse in a future state for the sake of trying something new?

A. Certainly yes.

J. Would you like to live over again once or forever, rather than run the risk of annihilation, or of a better or a worse state at or after death?

A. Most certainly I would not.
J. How valiant you are!

A. Aye, at this moment, and at all other moments of my life that I can recollect; but who can tell what will become of his bravery when his flesh and his heart shall fail him? Bolingbroke said his philosophy was not sufficient to support him in his last hours. D'Alembert said: 'Happy are they who have courage, but I have none.' Voltaire, the greatest genius of them all, behaved like the greatest coward of them all at his death, as he had like the wisest fool of them all in his lifetime. Hume awkwardly affected to

sport away all sober thoughts. Who can answer for his last feelings and reflections, especially as the priests are in possession of the custom of making them the greatest engines of their craft? Procul este, profani!

J. How shall we, how can we, estimate the real value of human life?

A. I know not; I cannot weigh sensations and reflections, pleasures and pains, hopes and fears, in money scales. But I can tell you how I have heard it estimated by philosophers. One of my old friends and clients, a mandamus counselor against his will, a man of letters and virtues, without one vice that I ever knew or suspected except garrulity, William Vassall, asserted to me, and strenuously maintained, that 'pleasure is no compensation for pain.' An hundred years of the keenest delights of human life could not atone for one hour of bilious colic that he felt. The sublimity of this philosophy my dull genius could not reach. I was willing to state a fair account between pleasure and pain, and give credit for the balance, which I found very great in my favor.

Another philosopher, who, as they say, believed nothing, ridiculed the notion of a future state. One of the company asked, 'Why are you an enemy to a future state? Are you weary of life? Do you detest existence?' 'Weary of life? Detest existence?' said the philosopher. 'No! I love life so well, and am so attached to existence, that to be sure of immortality, I would consent to be pitched about with forks by the devils, among the flames of fire and brimstone, to all eternity.'

I find no resources in my courage for this exalted philosophy. I had rather be blotted out.

Il faut trancher ce mot. What is there in life to attach us to it but the hope of a future and a better? It is a cracker, a rocket, a firework at best.

I admire your navigation, and should like to sail with you, either in your bark or in my own alongside of yours. Hope with her gay ensigns displayed at the prow, Fear with her hobgoblins behind the stern. Hope springs eternal, and hope is all that endures. Take away hope and what remains? What pleasure, I mean? Take away fear, and what pain remains? Ninety-nine one-hunVOL. 134-NO. 6

dredths of the pleasures and pains of life are nothing but hopes and fears.

A sillier letter than my last.

Three days later he sent on his effort to answer Jefferson's inquiry on the reason or value of grief:

When I approach such questions as this, I consider myself like one of those little eels in vinaigre, or one of those animalcules in black or red pepper or in the horse-radish root, that bite our tongues so cruelly, reasoning upon the το παν. Of what use is this sting upon the tongue? Why might we not have the benefit of these stimulants without the sting? Why might we not have the fragrance and beauty of the rose without the thorn?

In the first place, however, we know not the connection between pleasure and pain. They seem to be mechanical and inseparable. How can we conceive a strong passion, a sanguine hope suddenly disappointed, without producing pain, or grief? It seems that grief, as a mere passion, must be in proportion to sensibility.

Did you ever see a portrait or a statue of a great man, without perceiving strong traits of pain and anxiety? Those furrows were all ploughed in the countenance by grief. Our juridical oracle, Sir Edward Coke, thought that none were fit for legislators and magistrates but ‘sad men.' And who were these sad men? They were aged men, who had been tossed and buffeted in the vicissitudes of life, forced upon profound reflection by grief and disappointment, and taught to command their passions and prejudices.

Grief drives men into habits of serious reflection, sharpens the understanding, and softens the heart; it compels them to arouse their reason, to assert its empire over their passions, propensities, and prejudices; to elevate them to a superiority over all human events; to give them the felicis animi immota tranquillitas; in short, to make them stoics and Christians. After all, as grief is pain it stands in the predicament of all evil, and the great question occurs, What is the origin and what the final cause of evil? This perhaps is known only to Omniscience. We poor mortals have nothing to do with

it but to fabricate all the good we can out of all inevitable evils and to avoid all that are avoidable; and many such there are, among which are our own unnecessary apprehensions and imaginary fears.

Jefferson bowed to these arguments as to grief: 'No answer remains to be given. You have exhausted the subject.' As to living his own seventythree years over again forever, he was hesitant:

With Chew's limitations from twentyfive to sixty I would say yes; and I might go further back, but not come lower down. For at the later period, with most of us, the powers of life are sensibly on the wane. If, in its full vigor, your friend Vassall could doubt its value, it must be purely a negative quantity when its evils alone remain. Yet I do not go into his opinion entirely. I do not agree that an age of pleasure is no compensation for a moment of pain. I think, with you, that life is a fair matter of account, and the balance often, nay, generally, in its favor. It is not indeed easy by calculation of intensity and time to apply a common measure, or to fix the par between pleasure and pain; yet it exists and it is measurable. On the question, for example, whether to be cut for the stone: The young, with the longer prospect of years, think these overbalance the pain of the operation. Dr. Franklin, at the age of eighty, thought his residuum of life not worth that price. I should have thought with him, even taking the stone out of the scale. There is a ripeness of time for death, regarding others as well as ourselves, when it is reasonable we should drop off and make room for another growth. When we have lived our generation out, we should not wish to encroach on another. I enjoy good health; I am happy in what is around me; yet I assure you I am ripe for leaving all this year, this day, this hour. If it could be doubted whether we would go back to twenty-five, how can it be whether we would go forward from seventythree? . . . Perhaps, however, I might accept of time to read Grimm before I go. Fifteen volumes of anecdotes and incidents, within the compass of my own time and cognizance, written by a man of genius, of

taste, of point, an acquaintance, the measure and traverses of whose mind I know, could not fail to turn the scale in favor of life during their perusal.

Adams is loath to let go so alluring a speculation. He returns to it once more in his next:

Let us state a few questions sub rosa. 1. Would you accept a life, if offered you, of equal pleasure and pain-for example: one million of moments of pleasure, and one million of moments of pain? Suppose the pleasure as exquisite as any in life, and the pain as exquisite as any; for example, stonegravel, gout, headache, earache, toothache, colic, etc. I would not. I would rather be blotted out.

2. Would you accept a life of one year of incessant gout, headache, etc., for seventytwo years of such life as you have enjoyed? I would not. (One year of colic = seventytwo of boules de savon; pretty, but unsubstantial.) I had rather be extinguished. You may vary these algebraical equations at pleasure and without end. All this ratiocination, calculation, call it what you will, is founded on the supposition of no future state. Promise me an eternal life free from pain, although in all other respects no better than our present terrestrial existence, I know not how many thousand years of Smithfield fevers I would not endure to obtain it. In fine, without the supposition of a future state, mankind and this globe appear to me the most sublime and beautiful bubble, and bauble, that imagination can conceive.

When they drift off to other subjects, books is inevitably one of them. Jefferson let slip a reference to Destutt de Tracy's three volumes on Ideology, which Adams seized:

"Three vols. of Ideology?' Pray explain to me this neological title. What does it mean? When Bonaparte used it I was delighted with it, upon the common principle of delight in everything we cannot understand. Does it mean Idiotism? The science of non compos mentuism? The science of Lunacy? The theory of Delirium? Or does

it mean the science of Self-love? Of amour propre? Or the elements of Vanity?

. . . I verily believe I was as wise and good seventy years ago, as now. At that period Lemuel Bryant was my parish priest, Joseph Claverly my Latin schoolmaster. Lemuel was a jolly, jocular, and liberal scholar and divine. Joseph was a scholar and a gentleman; but a bigoted Episcopalian, a downright conscientious, passiveobedience man in Church and State. The parson and the pedagogue lived much together, but were eternally disputing about government and religion. One day, when the schoolmaster had been more than commonly fanatical and declared if he were a monarch, he would have but one religion in

his dominions; the parson coolly replied, 'Claverly! you would be the best man in the world if you had no religion.'

Twenty times in the course of my late reading I have been on the point of breaking out, "This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.' But in this exclamation I should have been as fanatical as Bryant or Claverly. Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite society: I mean Hell.

This year of 1818 Adams's letters were fewer; the reason was the failing health and death of his dear Abigail. Next year the letters picked up again, and they continued to flash with interest and vivacity, but they were less frequent as the few remaining years spun on. Tenderness crept in more frequently. Jefferson wrote: 'I am satisfied and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without torment

ing or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence. I am sure that I know many, many things, and none more surely than that I love you with all my heart, and pray for the continuance of your life until you be tired of it yourself.' And again: 'Crippled wrists and fingers make writing slow and laborious. But while writing you, I lose the sense of these things in the recollection of ancient times, when youth and health made happiness out of everything.' 'You see,' said Adams, 'as my reason and intellect fail my imagination grows more wild and ungovernable, but my friendship remains

the same.'

Jefferson's last letter was handed to Adams by the Virginian's grandson, 'who, being on a visit to Boston, would think he had seen nothing were he to leave without seeing you. . . . Like other young people, he wishes in the winter nights of old age to recount to those around him what he has heard and learnt of the heroic age preceding his birth, and which of the Argonauts individually he was in time to have seen.' Adams replied with pleasant compliments for his friend's grandson. This was April in 1826.

They did not write again. They died soon after, within an hour of each other, Jefferson in his eighty-third year, Adams in his ninety-first, on the day they had both done so much to make memorable, the Fourth of July.

SHADES of Alice! Has the Walrus begun to talk again? No. It is only a silver-topped schoolboy who is trying to rememorize the Table of Liquid Weights and Measures, given in the Complete Arithmetic. He suffers because an hour after looking up the table he forgets whether three drams make a scruple, or eight scruples make a dram. As a last resort, he cuts out the table and pastes it in his hat. Now he has it right:

Three drops make one minim,
Eight minims make one scruple,
Three scruples make one dram,

Two or three drams make one drunk.

It is certainly so; nevertheless the last line is not in the Complete Arithmetic and the old schoolboy wonders if the book should not be called an 'Incomplete Arithmetic.'

Of course it is no longer proper to stress the dram. By amending the glorious Constitution given us by Fathers who themselves took a dram as often as the occasion required and whenever opportunity offered, we have abolished the dramshop and outlawed an ancient institution. But if drams go, scruples should go with them. The Eighteenth Amendment should provide a new Arithmetic, for why should school-children now recite in unison: 'Sixty minims make a fluidrachm; 128 fluidrachms make a pint,' when possession of a pint is perilous? Two pints make a quart that we never shall forget, no matter how long we live. And truly the quart is a noble

measure, a respectable, tangible, sensible, solid unit. Yet not one in twenty thousand who know what the dimensions of a quart are could tell his neighbor, if the neighbor desired to know, that there were just 256 fluidrachms in a quart or 15,360 minims! Moreover, the Apothecaries' Fluid-Measure Table unblushingly declares that the minim is equal to a drop of water. What then do poets have in mind when they sing so blithely of 'a wee drappie'?

The word dram, which we now must forget and forgive, comes from the Greek drachma, a coin. In the late degenerate days, drams were given freely and taken freely and, by what we may call a gentlemen's agreement, were about three teaspoonfuls; thus pleasing the palate without gorging the gullet. Now whether the ancient Greeks did really toss a coin across the counter in compensation for three scruples or teaspoonfuls of nectar we know not; but on the general principle of give and take and in the code which prescribes 'no coin - no dram' it seems plausible that even among the gods themselves a drachma may have become synonymous with a drink. Ambrosia Ambrosia cannot cannot be given away gratis even on Olympus; and it is a pleasing picture, that of Ganymede, cupbearer to the gods, receiving one good drachma in exchange for one good draught from the pitcher.

But some impatient soul will say, 'What has all this drinking of drams to do with kings' noses?' Patience! We shall yet show the connection; but not,