I have just received your obliging reply from Monticello of 23 July 1818, and I hasten to send you my heartfelt thanks for the details you were so kind as to communicate to me regarding your honorable and illustrious friend General Kosciuszko. I would like to seize the opportunity of associating your name with his, in writing his biography, and this will be a very pleasant thing to do under his shadow. I am awaiting information that will supposedly be sent to me from Poland, and Messrs. Gallatin and Lafayette will help me to review and perfect the monument I wish to erect to the memory of a good man. In comparing the revolutions in Poland, America, and France, one sees that Kosciuszko’s life can be linked to all three.

Poland, a nation still immersed in the chaos of feudal anarchy, cannot rely solely on the power of its oligarchic nobility to create and consolidate its independence. It also cannot count on the support of the masses, because they are strangers to the belief in human dignity and a citizens’ rights. It is thus becoming the prey of the copartitioning powers.

Still young and unspoiled, the American nation struggles energetically and triumphs. It is fixing its destiny honorably, establishing freedom on a solid foundation, and offering the world a generous and useful example. Its revolution is being fulfilled, and under the auspices of freedom all the elements of civilization and prosperity are growing amongst its industrious inhabitants.

France, which was neither as brutalized and corrupt as Poland nor as strong in original purity and the virtue of its citizens as America, faces greater obstacles, but it is courageously working its way toward its desired goal. Despite civil dissensions, bloody oppositions, the raging of factions, the crimes of unleashed passions, the perfidies and plots of the dying aristocracy, the excesses of permissiveness and anarchy that wish to usurp liberty’s image and name, and the attacks of military despotism seeking to impress public opinion with the glamor of its conquests and illusions of a false glory, France, armed with a mass of enlightened, persevering men, is gradually repairing its losses, its misfortunes, and even its mistakes, and is slowly but surely succeeding in founding its constitutional liberty.

I believe, Sir, that a brief survey of the episodes naturally arising out of the three revolutions, Polish, American, and French, and establishing a connection between them and the life of Kosciuszko, who participated directly or indirectly, but always honorably, in the political and military events of those revolutions, will add new interest to an extraordinary history that cannot fail to offer a model of pure and unwavering patriotism. I will not rush to complete or publish this work, in order that I may have time to collect and combine all the elements and materials of which it is to be composed and, if I can, to make it worthy of the public’s attention and the virtues of the hero I must celebrate.

I have the honor, Sir, of offering you the results of my most recent labors:

1st, the second part (the only one printed separately thus far) of a report I made to the Société pour l’Instruction Élémentaire of Paris on elementary textbooks for children of the poor and industrious classes.

2d, the Esquisse d’un Essai sur la Philosophie des Sciences, of which I include a second copy for a philosophical society of your choosing in the United States, to which I would like to offer this work under your auspices.

3d, the first number of the Revue Encyclopédique, a scientific and literary compilation which I have long conceived and outlined, and for the composition of which several distinguished scholars and literary men have eagerly joined me. I dare hope that you will approve of this work’s spirit and objectives, which are explained in the introduction and in the complementary circular letter, and that you will consent to find me some correspondents among your compatriots in various scientific areas to provide me with scientific and literary news, bibliographical notices, or announcements summarizing selected works.

With my thanks and expression of the greatest regret that your preceding letters did not reach me, I have the honor to renew to you, Sir, the homage of my sincere sentiments of esteem and respect.