indifferent; but where I know a mind to be ingenuous, and to need only
truth to set it to rights, I cannot be as passive. The act of personal
unkindness alluded to in your former letter, is said in your last to
have been the removal of your eldest son from some office to which
the judges had appointed him. I conclude, then, he must have been a
commissioner of bankruptcy. But I declare to you, on my honor, that
this is the first knowledge I have ever had that he was so. It may be
thought, perhaps, that I ought to have inquired who were such, before
I appointed others. But it is to be observed, that the former law
permitted the judges to name commissioners occasionally only, for every
case as it arose, and not to make them permanent officers. Nobody,
therefore, being in office, there could be no removal. The judges, you
well know, have been considered as highly federal; and it was noted
that they confined their nominations exclusively to federalists. The
legislature, dissatisfied with this, transferred the nomination to the
President, and made the offices permanent. The very object in passing
the law was, that he should correct, not confirm, what was deemed the
partiality of the judges. I thought it therefore proper to inquire,
not whom they had employed, but whom I ought to appoint to fulfil
the intentions of the law. In making these appointments, I put in a
proportion of federalists, equal, I believe, to the proportion they bear
in numbers through the Union generally. Had I known that your son had
acted, it would have been a real pleasure to me to have preferred him
to some who were named in Boston, in what was deemed the same line
of politics. To this I should have been led by my knowledge of his
integrity, as well as my sincere dispositions towards yourself and Mr.
Adams.

You seem to think it devolved on the judges to decide on the validity of
the sedition law. But nothing in the constitution has given them a right