counsel in that case from the pages of the reporter to your book. unless it be because in the form you have given them, they may be if not so impartially at least more conveniently, put into the hands of the members of the legislature.

It was unnecessary for you to give yourself the trouble of writing and publishing, to let it be known that your legal opinions, on the questions which have been so frequently agitated in this matter, did not coincide with the opinions of Chancellor Kent, the Judges of the Supreme Court, and all the members of the Court of Errors. Your deadly hostility to the interest of Messrs. Livingston and Fulton, and to those who claim under them, you have heretofore lost no opportunity of manifesting. Those who from interest or principle advocate the validity of this grant, have always calculated on the full weight of your opposition; and however important your legal acquirements may have become, it is not yet believed there is reason to fear your opinion or wishes will preponderate, against the judgments of men who have long been distinguished as able, experienced and learned professional characters.

I must beg you to observe, I do not allege that you have copied any part of your letter from what has been before written. On the contrary I admit that you have conveyed the ideas of others in a And I admit there is a

style that is your own.

certain lofty pretension in your language which is no doubt extremely satisfactory to yourself, and will unquestionably have its admirers. But while I make this admission I must say, that your attention to dignity has sometimes left an obscurity in your meaning; and with the elegance of your composition is mixed a bitterness which I cannot think betrays a very happy disposition.

You seem to cherish an hostility to those against whom you have enlisted with so much zeal, which one would think must have some foundation deeper than the controversy in which you have engaged. You have, you say, ever been among the most forward to admit, that Messrs. Livingston and Fulton were entitled to the gratitude of the state. Upon what occasion you have evinced this disposition, I do not know; but if it be so, your conduct must remind one of the charity of the priest, who was never willing to bestow any thing but his blessing. We have only seen you foremost in every struggle which has been made to deprive the persons whom you affect to commend, of the reward which repeated acts of the legislature and the judgment of the highest tribunal in the country had assured to them. The publication I am now answering is a new instance of your efforts to accomplish the same object, and an additional proof of your determination to exert all the influence, which circumstances may

give you, in favor of those who under the most disgusting pretences, are endeavoring to prey on that property, to the protection of which the faith of the state has been so often and so solemnly pledged.

But the questions which I propose to discuss are too important to be mixed with what may be considered as relating personally either to me or to you. I shall therefore endeavor to refrain from any undue expressions of those feelings, without which, I am willing to confess, I cannot write or speak on this subject. I have no disposition to conceal my deep personal interest in the matter in controversy. Upon the faith of the laws granting and confirming the exclusive right, I have embarked all I am worth in the world. When these laws had received the sanction of five different legislatures; when they had been approved both as just and constitutional by many of our most distinguished statesmen and jurists, and when, finally, they had received the unanimous judgment of the highest tribunal in our state, I invested in the property they professed to grant and to protect, all the fruits of five and twenty years of the most unremitted and devoted application to a laborious profession. At a time of life, and with a constitution, which assure me that I could not so long pursue my accustomed habits of application as to be able to make any new provis

ion for an advanced age, or the family I might leave, it must be expected that my present interest will influence my feelings. But if I know myself, it is not my personal interest alone that prompts me to vindicate the characters of Mr. Livingston and Mr. Fulton. and the rights which were granted to them. I knew these gentlemen well, I knew their virtues and their talents. I was proud to call them my friends. I well knew the difficulties with which Mr. Fulton had struggled before he attained any success. I knew the pecuniary embarrassments which they brought upon him; and which are all that his children have yet inherited and, should his enemies prevail, all they ever will inherit from him. I could not see the memory of such a man assailed as if he had been a vile impostor. I could not see him treated as if he had brought upon his country some baleful curse, when in every other part of the world he is respected as one of the greatest benefactors of mankind for what he accomplished here. I felt myself bound, and I do yet feel myself bound, to vindicate his character and to expose, so far as I am able, the injustice of the attacks which are made on the property of his children.

But if my personal interest, or a zeal to vindicate the rights and characters of my friends, have led me to express myself indecorously towards the committee of which you were a member, I regret

it. I owe to the other members of that committee this assurance, that I had no intention to speak of them with any disrespect, nor otherwise than as disapproving their report and the circumstances connected with it. You, sir, have no right to expect the same acknowledgment from

me.

1

Although the language you have chosen to address to me would justify in retaliation almost any terms I might apply to you, yet I shall endeavour to express myself as little offensively as possible. I shall nevertheless be under the necessity of repeating the allegations, made in the Biography of Fulton, respecting the committee; because, in the "technical sense of the terms," I believe them "true in fact." I shall appeal to your own book to prove them so. I very much deceive myself if I do not prove from your own book, to the entire satisfaction of every "undeluded, candid man,' that what I said of the committee was correct.

I feel confident of convincing every person “not blinded by prejudice," that the committee did refuse to listen to the most earnest solicitations to delay their report, that Mr. Fulton might be sent for from New-York, and heard before them as Governor Ogden had been: That the committee stated in their report, what they represented to be facts, but of which they had no testimony before them That they did in their report contrast with partiality the merits of Dod and Fitch with those B