1822 April 17

Rid Yourselves

Letter 18. Relinquish t

' 6. Case V. Subjection uncontested

2. Buyers foreigners

In the establishment of Columbia /separate/ there must have been

force for separate advantage for the preceding vastness

[...?] that surrenders itself and others on principle of pain and anxiety

Once more, as to distance. Form distance of

so many parts comes vastness of the whole: and from vastness in territory and

population together, complication in the government,and in government complication

over and above what is necessary is the root /a source/ of all evil: for it is a

screen to all evil.

True. But as in /of/ the government of the Anglo-American United

States the facility of access to melioration is an essential character of melioration

in all points, so of melioration in regard to extent of territory. With less

difficulty than any other say rather without any difficulty if it be for the greater

happiness of the greatest number, it may be and will be decomposed like a polype

decomposed by itself and without pain not as the polype has been decomposed, by the

operation of the torturing /an experimentalists tormenting //cruel// knife.

Suppose it thus derided for example into four such governments, four such

confederacies as the present: as one of the advantages possessed by the present which

will (so it seems to me) be lost by the /in a/ separation made of it into these four

parts. In every one of them the superior constitutive power will be in the hands of

the many, who have nothing to gain and every thing to lose by war: therefore as

between one and another of those confederacies there will never be any war. But, so

as the neighbours are but on terms of peace and good will with it, it is the interest

of the people in every state that others in general and in particular its next

neighbours be in a state of the greatest prosperity possible: the more prosperous the

more serviceable in the character of customers and helpers. In the eyes of each of

these then, each man will see the invader of the prosperity of any one of these its

/his/ neighbour the invader of his own. To all other states this will be sufficiently

manifest: so manifest that to attack any one of them will be an enterprize too

perilous in the eyes of the rulers of all other States to all enterprize too

perilous