vent, so easy and so flattering, she led a life of self-denial which was not romantic nor picturesque, but homely and most real.

Late in August, 1789, the tardy leave of absence arrived, and the family hastened to conclude their preparations for the voyage. There was not much to do. Every thing at the legation was to be left unchanged, in the care of Mr. Short, who was to be the official chargé till Mr. Jefferson returned. To the last hour of his stay, this most zealous, faithful, and vigilant of ministers continued to render timely and fortunate services to his country's commerce with France, which had grown under his fostering touch from next to nothing to something considerable. It had been happy for him, perhaps, if he had not gone to America then. In Paris he was in harmony with the prevailing tone. In Paris his fitness for his place was curiously complete. In Paris he was sole of his kind,admired, believed in, trusted, liked, beloved. In Paris, with an ocean between him and New York, he might have said No to the invitation the acceptance of which changed the current of his life. But it was in his destiny to go, and go he must.

His five years' life in Paris had done much for his general culture, and more for his particular training as a public man. He had become a swift, cool, adroit, thoroughly trained, and perfectly accomplished minister; and this without ceasing to be a man and a citizen, without hardening and narrowing into the professional diplomatist, without losing his interest or his faith in mankind. We have seen how deeply he was moved, on his arrival in Europe, by the condition of the people; nineteen-twentieths of the whole population, as he rashly computed, being more wretched and more. hopeless than the most miserable being who could be found in all the length and breadth of America. These first impressions were never effaced. When he had spent years in Europe, his disapproval of its political system - hereditary rank and irresponsible power-remained passionate and unspeakable. Whenever, in hist letters or other writings of the time, he touches that theme, his style rises, intensifies, warms; his words become short and simple, his similes homely and familiar; every phrase betrays heartfelt conviction.

In his numerous contributions of material for the Encyclopédie and similar works, he had evidently tried to get into them as much of the genuine republican essence as the censor could be expected

to admit. It had been his delight to explain the state of things in America, where, as he said, no distinction between man and man had ever been known, except that conferred by office; where "the poorest laborer stood on equal ground with the wealthiest millionnaire, and generally on a favored one whenever their rights seemed to jar;" where "a shoemaker or other artisan, removed by the voice of his country into a chair of office, instantly commanded all the respect and obedience which the laws ascribe to his office;" where, "of distinction by birth or badge, the people had no more idea than they had of the mode of existence in the moon or planets;" having merely heard there were such, and knowing they must be wrong. Hence, he said, that due horror of the evils flowing from that barbaric system could only be excited in Europe, where "the dignity of man is lost in arbitrary distinctions, where the human species is classed into several stages of degradation, where the many are crushed under the weight of the few, and where the order established can present no other picture than that of God Almighty and his angels trampling under foot the host of the damned."

Such utterances as these and they abound in his Paris letters were penned before Buncombe County in North Carolina had been "laid off." They grew from the native elevation of his mind. They attest his high-breeding, as well as his humanity and good sense. The gentleman speaks in them, as well as the citizen; for to be an American citizen, and not feel so, is to be of the Vulgar.

But, in those days, no American could boast of his country's freedom, without laying himself open to a taunt. Did Jefferson forget that the laborers of his own State were slaves, when he vaunted the equality of its people? Not always. He confessed the shame of it; he foretold the ruin enclosed within it. "What an incomprehensible machine is man!" he exclaims, "who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment, and death itself, in vindication of his own liberty, and, the next moment, be deaf to all those motives whose power supported him through his trial, and inflict on his fellow-men a bondage one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose!" But, then, he threw the burden of delivering the slaves of Virginia upon that convenient resource of self-indulgent mortals, "Providence." An "overruling Providence," he thought, would at

length effect what the masters of Virginia ought at once to do. When the measure of the slaves' tears should be full, then " a God of justice will awaken to their distress, and by diffusing light and liberality among their oppressors, or, at length, by his exterminating thunder, manifest his attention to the things of this world, and that they are not left to the guidance of a blind fatality."

To the moment of his departure from Europe, we find him still a warm lover of France, and devoted to the alliance between the two countries. The last letter which he wrote to Madison in Paris contains a passage on the alliance, which, coming from the placid Jefferson, we may almost call fiery:

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"When, of two nations, the one has engaged herself in a ruinous war for us, has spent her blood and money to save us, has opened her bosom to us in peace, and received us almost on the footing of her own citizens; while the other has moved heaven, earth, and hell to exterminate us in war, has insulted us in all her councils in peace, shut her doors to us in every port where her interests would admit it, libelled us in foreign nations, endeavored to poison them against the reception of our most precious commodities, to place these two nations on a footing is to give a great deal more to one than to the other, if the maxim be true, that to make unequal quan tities equal, you must add more to one than to the other. To say, in excuse, that gratitude is never to enter into the motives of national conduct, is to revive a principle which has been buried for centuries with the kindred principles of the lawfulness of assassina tion, poison, and perjury. . . . I know but one code of morality for men, whether acting singly or collectively."

Such was his feeling with regard to France and England in 1789 before there were "Gallicans or "Anglicans," still less "Gallomaniacs " or "Anglomaniacs," among his countrymen.

And, since I am endeavoring to show what manner of mind Thomas Jefferson brought back with him to his native land in 1789, I must allude to another matter. He carried his view of the rights of the individual mind to an extreme, which, in that age, had few supporters in his own country. His moral system was strict; his "doxy" was startlingly lax. The advice he gave his nephews on these points, when they were college students, might be summed up

in words like these: Perfect freedom of thinking, but no other freedom! To do right and feel humanely, we are bound: it is an honor able bondage, and he is noblest who is most submissive to it; but, in matters of opinion, it is infamy not to be free. These sentences, among others, he addressed to Peter Carr in college in 1787:

Religion. In the first place, divest yourself of all bias in favor of novelty and singularity of opinion. Indulge them on any other subject rather than that of religion. On the other hand, shake off all the fears and servile prejudices under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix Reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than of blindfolded fear. You will naturally examine, first, the religion of your own country. Read the Bible, then, as you would Livy or Tacitus. For example, in the Book of Joshua we are told the sun stood still for several hours. Were we to read that fact in Livy or Tacitus, we should class it with their showers of blood, speaking of statues, beasts, etc. But it is said that the writer of that book was inspired. Examine, therefore, candidly, what evidence there is of his having been inspired. The pretension is entitled to your inquiry, because millions believe it. On the other hand, you are astronomer enough to know how contrary it is to the law of nature. You will next read the New Testament. It is the history of a personage called Jesus. Keep in your eye the opposite pretensions: 1, Of those who say he was begotten by God, born of a virgin, suspended and reversed the laws of nature at will, and ascended bodily into heaven; and, 2, Of those who say he was a man of illegitimate birth, of a benevolent heart, enthusiastic mind, who set out with pretensions to divinity, ended in believing them, and was punished capitally for sedition, by being gibbeted, according to the Roman law, which punished the first commission of that offence by whipping, and the second by exile, or death in furca. See this law in Digest, lib. 48, tit. 19, ¶ 28, 3, and Lipsius, lib. 2, de cruce, cap. 2. Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it ends in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you will feel in its exercise,- and the love of others which it will procure you. If you find reason to believe there is a

God, a consciousness that you are acting under his eye, and that he approves you, will be a vast additional incitement: if that Jesus was also a God, you will be comforted by a belief of his aid and love. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by Heaven; and you are answerable, not for the rightness, but uprightness, of the decision."

Such sentiments as these, which he cherished as long as he lived, were familiar enough then to the educated class of the United States, as of Christendom generally; but they were seldom stated with such uncompromising bluntness as in the passage from which these sentences are selected. He disposed of subtler questions in the same letter with equal abruptness: "Conscience is as much a part of a man as his leg or arm. It is given to all human beings. in a stronger or weaker degree, as force of members is given them in a greater or less degree. It may be strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of the body."

His long residence in a metropolis had not freed his mind from some provincial prejudices. He shared the common opinion of that age, that virtue was a product of the country, rather than the town, and that farmers were better citizens than mechanics or merchants. He spoke occasionally of mechanics as a class disposed to turbulence, as if he had derived his knowledge of them from Shakspeare's Julius Cæsar, rather than from the workshops of his own time. He hoped the period was remote when many of his countrymen would be employed in manufactures; which he evidently regarded, with Franklin, as a kind of necessary evil, or last resource of an over-populated country. But his special aversion was mer"Merchants," he wrote, "are the least virtuous citizens, and possess the least amor patria." The reason why Rhode Island was so difficult, and Connecticut so easy, to be brought to consent to reasonable measures, he thought, was this: In Connecticut there was scarcely a man who was not a farmer, and in Rhode Island almost every one was a merchant. All this, which savors of the country gentleman, seeins to us of the present day crude and erroneous. Rhode Island might well pause, in 1787, before surrendering control of the business to which she owed her whole subsistence. Observe a one-eyed man, when splinters are flying, with what anxious vigilance he guards the organ which alone saves him from a lifetime's darkness. Rhode Island's commerce was like that last charge