scious, he said, of having merited the esteem of his countrymen, which he dearly prized, by an integrity which could not be reproached, and by an enthusiastic devotion to their rights and to liberty, he "would not suffer his retirement to be clouded by the slanders of a man whose history, from the moment at which history could stoop to notice him, was a tissue of machinations against the liberty of the country which had not only received and given him bread, but heaped its honors upon his head." But during the short time he had to remain in office, he should find "ample employment in closing the present business of the departiment."

This letter was written at Monticello. On his way to Philadel phia he stopped, as usual, at Mount Vernon, when the president renewed the subject in conversation, and urged him to reconsider his intention to resign; for he "thought it important to preserve the check of his opinions in the administration to keep things in the proper channel and prevent them from going too far." The check! The check to what? The president said he did not believe there were ten men, worth consideration, in the country, who had so much as a thought of transforming the republic into a monarchy. Mr. Jefferson replied that there was "a numerous sect who had monarchy in contemplation, of whom the secretary of the treasury was one." The most intimate friend Hamilton ever had was Gouverneur Morris, who pronounced his funeral oration. This exquisite writer stated Hamilton's opinions at much length in 1811, in a letter to Robert Walsh of Philadelphia. The following are some of Morris's expressions: "General Hamilton disliked the Constitution, believing all republican government radically defective. . . . He hated republican government. . . . He trusted, that, in the changes and chances of time, we should be involved in some war, which might strengthen our union and nerve the executive. . . . He never failed on every occasion to advocate the excellence of, and avow his attachment to, monarchical government." The other points of difference were gone over, but without lessening Mr. Jefferson's passionate desire to retire from public life. But, on reaching Philadelphia, friends insisted on his remaining in office with such pertinacity, and offered reasons so cogent, that he knew not how either to rebut or accept them.

CHAPTER XLVIII.

CAUSES OF HIS DESIRE TO RESIGN.

No language can overstate his longing for retreat. Six months before the Fenno assaults began, this had been the burden of his letters to his family and friends. "The ensuing year," he wrote to his daughter, in March, 1792, "will be the longest of my life, and the last of such hateful labors: the next we will sow our cabbages together." To other friends he said that the 4th of March, 1793, was to him what land was to Columbus. He had sent to Scotland for one of the new threshing-machines, and a plough of his invention had recently won a medal in France. He had engaged mechanics in Europe to work upon his house, and upon other schemes which he had formed. He was packing his books in view of the termination of the lease of his house in Philadelphia, and had arranged for one of its inmates, "Jack Eppes," to enter William and Mary in the spring. Schemes upon schemes were forming in his mind for extricating his great estate from encumbrance, and turning its latent resources to better account than could be expected from overseers. But the attacks in the newspapers and the hostility of powerful classes, though they intensified his desire for repose, seemed to interpose a barrier which he could not pass. He was torn with contending emotions. "I have been," he wrote to his daughter in January, 1793,"under an agitation of mind which I scarcely ever experienced before, produced by a check on my purpose of returning home at the close of this session of Congress." Madison, Monroe, Page, Randolph, all friends and all partisans, united in the opinion that he must not give the Federalists the triumph of being able to say, with an appearance of truth, that Hamilton had driven him from office. He consented, at length, to remain a short time longer. He sent most of his library home, sold the bulkier articles of his fur

niture, gave up his house, took three rooms in the suburbs, and "held himself in readiness to take his departure for Monticello the first moment he could do it with due respect to himself." Thus he wrote to the father of "Jack Eppes," in April, 1793.

But why this agonizing desire for retirement? Thereby hangs a tale. If we give ten reasons for a certain course of conduct, there is often an eleventh which we do not give; and that unspoken one is apt to be the reason. He could no longer afford to serve the public on the terms fixed by Congress. It was not merely that his salary did not pay the cost of his Philadelphia establishment, nor that his estate was ill-managed by overseers. An ancient debt hung, as he says, "like a millstone round his neck," a debt which he had twice paid, although not incurred by him. Upon the death of his wife's father, twenty years before, he had received property from his estate worth forty thousand dollars, but subject to a British debt of thirteen thousand. Impatient of debt, he sold a fine farm near Monticello for a sum sufficient to discharge it; but, by the time he received the money, the war of the Revolution had begun. Virginia invited all men owing money to Great Britain to deposit the same in her treasury, the State agreeing to pay it over to the British creditor after the war. The identical coin which Jefferson received for his farm he himself carried to the treasury in Williamsburg, where it was immediately expended in equipping troops.

The legislature of Virginia, however, thought better of this policy, rescinded the resolution, and returned the sums received under it. But Jefferson was obliged to take back his thirteen thousand dollars in depreciated paper, which continued to depreciate until it was worthless. In fact, the thirteen thousand dollars just sufficed to buy him one garment; and in riding by that farm, in after years, he would sometimes point to it, and say laughing, "That farm I once sold for an overcoat." At the end of the war, during which Cornwallis destroyed more than enough of his property to pay this debt, he had, as he remarked, " to lay his shoulders to the payment of it a third time," in addition to a considerable debt of his own, incurred just before the outbreak of hostilities. "What the laws of Virginia," he wrote to his creditor in England, "are, or may be, will in no wise influence my conduct. Substantial justice is my object, as decided by reason, not by authority or compulsion." Ever since the war closed, he had been struggling to

reduce these debts, and finally made an arrangement for paying them off at the rate of four hundred pounds sterling a year. How easy this ought to have been to a person owning ten thousand acres of excellent land, "one hundred and fifty-four slaves, thirty-four horses, five mules, two hundred and forty-nine cattle, three hundred and ninety hogs, and three sheep!" But only two thousand acres of his land were cultivated; nine of his horses were used for the saddle; and the labor of his slaves had been for ten years directed by overseers. In 1793 the greater part of the debt remained to be discharged; and he saw, whenever he visited Monticello, such evidences of "the ravages of overseers as filled him with alarm. He had now a son-in-law to settle, a second daughter to establish, a mountainous debt to pay, a high office to live up to, and an estate going to ruin. Behold his eleventh, unuttered reason for the frenzy which possessed him to live at home.

He might well desire to see the reign of overseers brought to an end on his estate. Readers remember, perhaps, General Washington's experience with them. How, when he owned one hundred and one cows, he was compelled to buy butter for his own table; and how, after building one of the best barns in the country, where thirty men could conveniently wield the flail, he could not prevent his manager from treading out the grain with horses, so impossible was it, he says, "to put the overseers of this country out of the track they have been accustomed to walk in." He reached home for his annual vacation in 1793, about the middle of September, and caught this truly conservative gentleman in the act. "I found a treading-yard," wrote the president, "not thirty feet from the barndoor, the wheat again brought out of the barn, and horses treading it out in an open exposure, liable to the vicissitudes of weather." With such men to manage, the general thought the new threshingmachine would have a brief existence. What need there was, then, of the master's eye upon an encumbered estate !

Jefferson settled to his work again in Philadelphia, and watched for a good opportunity to resign. Through the good offices of the president, a truce was arranged between the two hostile secretaries, who tried their best to co-operate in peace, not without success. Hamilton, in particular, was scrupulously careful to avoid the error of interfering, or seeming to interfere, in his colleague's department. At heart each felt the sincerity and patriotic intentions of the

other, and Jefferson had even an exaggerated idea of Hamilton's ability. The elections, too, of 1792, had strengthened the Republicans in Congress, who gained a decisive triumph in the first month of the session, by defeating (thirty-five to eleven) a proposition to allow members of the cabinet to attend the house of Representatives, and explain "their measures" to the House. This made it easier for Jefferson to continue. And, besides, the French Revolu tion, of late, had turned in arms upon the kings banded against it, and seemed to be able, contrary to all expectation, to hold its own. As yet nearly all America was in enthusiastic sympathy with France. When the news arrived of a movement favorable to the French, the "monocrats," as Jefferson styled the Othercrats, made wry faces; but the Republicans set the bells ringing, illuminated their houses, and wore a tri-colored cockade in their hats.

The time was at hand when the youngest of the nations would need in its government the best talent it could command, and, above all, in the department which directed its intercourse with foreign nations. The French king had been dethroned, and was about to be brought to trial, all the world looking on with an interest difficult now to conceive. It stirred Jefferson's indignation sometimes, to observe that mankind were more attentive to the sufferings of the king and queen than to the welfare of the people of France. “Such are the fruits," he once wrote, "of that form of government which heaps importance upon idiots, and which the Tories of the present day are trying to preach into our favor." It pleased many of the Republicans, however, to learn that Thomas Paine, one of themselves, was exerting himself ably to save the king's life. Paine said in the Convention, that "Louis Capet," if he had been slightly favored by fortune, if he had been born in a private station in "an amiable and respectable neighborhood," would have been, in all probability, a virtuous citizen; but cursed from the dawn of his reason with ceaseless adulation, and reared in "brutal luxury," he was a victim of monarchy, as well as the agent of its ill-working. England, he reminded the Convention, had cut off the head of a very bad Charles Stuart, only to be plagued, a few years after, with a worse; but when, forty years later, England had banished the Stuarts, there was an end to their doing harm in the world.

What a happy stroke was this in a French Assembly! He followed it up by offering to accompany the fallen king to the only ally