I have the honor of addressing the duplicates of three dispatches to you which I sent to you on the 23rd by the Minerva. 1 They do not contain anything new besides the two final pages of the first one which report the latest news from Geneva.2 It is no longer just a transient revolution they have in 308 store there. It is a destructive fury that appears to threaten particularly the humanities and sciences and, above all, our religious and academic institutions. As though from the point of view of these revolutionaries, no less blind than bloodthirsty, our academy, which has showered Geneva with good fortune, had, along with religion, suddenly become an aristocratic institution!

This disastrous news has me wedded more and more to the project I submitted to you, sir, and renders its feasability in what concerns the Genevans ever more manifest to me if America in its turn accepts the sacrifice necessary for its success.3 Yet I am completely ignorant whether she will want to lend herself to it, not, I say, for the sake of the industry and capital which our settlers would bring, but in regard to our misfortunes, and above all, to promote an undertaking as extraordinary and as novel as the transplant of a university.

The endowment I request to reestablish it may seem enormous. But if one considers that in the circumstances in which we now find ourselves, we must, from its inception, give it all of the breadth of which it is capable to guarantee the very success of its resettlement; if one observes that it would be just as easy and important to join a separate school to it for the education of the poorest children of both sexes, a school which would consequently need to be free as it is for us in all that concerns the assistance of primary instruction; one will understand how modest and at the same time indispensable is the sum I solicit. It seems so indeed from my view that I would not be able to recommmend such a hazardous enterprise to our academic colony without securing assets of a comparable sum. And it is nevertheless this academic colony which must be our nucleus to insure the success of our agricultural and commercial colony.

All of the various insights which it was in my power to gather from so far away would lead me to believe, sir, that a greater or lesser proximity to the federal city would perhaps be the most appropriate location for our establishment, so that it could blend admirably well with that of the nascent capital, and be of equal utility either to the province of Maryland or to that of Virginia. Besides, if it is true that the latter is seeking means to increase the number of its institutions of public education, it appears that by adopting our colony, she could find something to compensate, at the same time and in her own bosom, for the spendthrift education overseas that a portion of her youth comes to seek on our continent.

The wealth of this latter province would seem moreover to offer an additional means for the prompt and complete success of our negotiations by easing them all the more; either by gift of lands which she may still possess, or by appropriation of any other sufficient annual revenue. If you conclude as I do, sir, surely no one would be as well suited to prepare the ground for this outcome and to insure it than his excellency General Washington and Mr. Jefferson to whom I pray you willingly communicate my dispatches to this effect, and present my respects.

Pray accept the expression of that with which I have the honor to be, sir, your most humble and most obedient servant