Dear Lund,

Your letter of the 19^th, which came to hand by the last post, gives a melancholy account of your prospects for a crop, and a still more melancholy one of the decay of public virtue. The first I submit to with the most perfect resignation and cheerfulness. I look upon every dispensation of Providence as designed to answer some valuable purpose, and hope I shall always possess a sufficient degree of fortitude to bear without murmuring any stroke which may happen, either to my person or estate, from that quarter. But I cannot, with any degree of patience, behold the infamous practices of speculators, monopolizers, and all that class of gentry which are preying upon our very vitals, and, for the sake of a little dirty pelf, are putting the rights and liberties of the country into the most imminent danger, and continuing a war destructive to the lives and property of the valuable part of this community, which would have ceased last fall as certain as we now exist but for the encouragements the enemy derived from this source, the depreciation of the money (which in a great measure is the consequence of it) and our own internal divisions.