Good government is without selfish interests

[This is Part 2 of my letter to my granddaughter Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge, August 27, 1825, showing her how good government can help provide for the happiness of people. I gave Ellen my desk that I wrote the Declaration of Independence on.]

I am glad you took the delightful tour which you describe in your letter. It is almost exactly that which Mr. Madison and myself pursued in May and June 1791. Setting out from Philadelphia, our course was to N. York, up the Hudson to Albany, Troy, Saratoga, Ft Edward, Ft George, L. George Ticonderoga, Crown point, penetrated into L. Champlain, returned the same way to Saratoga, thence crossed the mountains to Bennington, Northampton, along Connecticut river to its mouth, crossed the Sound into Long-island, and along its Northern margin to Brooklyn, re-crossed to N. York and returned. But, from Saratoga till we got back to Northampton, was then mostly desert. Now it is what 34 years of free and good government have made it. It shews how soon the labor of man would make a paradise of the whole earth, were it not for misgovernment, & a diversion of all his energies from their proper object, the happiness of man, to the selfish interests of kings, nobles, and priests.