CHAPTER LXX

HIS LABORS TO PROMOTE EDUCATION.

BUT his conduct was wiser than his words; for he spent all his declining years in a singularly persistent endeavor to introduce into Virginia the institutions of New England. When a man finds himself a member of a community in which there is incorporated some all-pervading evil, — like slavery in old Virginia, like ill-distributed wealth in Great Britain now, there are two ways in which he can attack it. One way is to cry aloud and spare not; place himself distinctly in opposition to the evil; show it no quarter; and take the chance of being a martyr or a conqueror. There are times and places when this heroic system is the only one admissible. The other method of attack is to set on foot measures, the fair working of which will infuse such health and vigor into the sick body politic as will enable it, at length, to cast out the disease. Thus we see that Yale, Harvard, and the common school, have gone far toward rescuing the fine intelligence of New England from the blight of the Mathers and their hideous ideas; and we see the cheap press and the workingmen's lyceums and unions of Great Britain about to break up entail, primogeniture, and the rich preserves of an exclusive army, navy, India, and church. In Virginia no other method but this was even possible to be attempted in Jefferson's time. If he had set free his slaves, and waged open war against slavery, he would not have improved their condition, nor mitigated the malady of which Virginia was dying. His slaves would have become vagabonds, and himself an object of commiseration and derision. He made no such Quixotic attempts to serve his State, but directed his efforts to the gradual removal of what he felt to be the ally and main support of all the evil in the universe, IGNORANCE. He made this his business during the last sixteen years of his life,

and toiled at it as vigorous men toil for the ordinary objects of ambition.

And happily, as in earlier days when the liberties of his country were menaced he had in Madison a confidential ally, gifted with a parliamentary talent which Nature had denied to himself; so now, when his object was to break up the great deep of Virginia ignorance, he found a most efficient and untiring co-operator in his friend, Joseph C. Cabell, a member of the Senate of Virginia. They entered into a holy alliance to bring their State up to the level demanded by the age. What both had planned in the study, Cabell advocated in the legislature; and when Cabell found the legislature unmanageable, Jefferson would come to his aid with one of his exhaustive, vote-changing letters, which would find its way into a Richmond newspaper, and then go the rounds of the press.

A part of the letters which passed between these lovers of their country have been published in an octavo of five hundred and twenty-eight pages; and most of Jefferson's, long and elaborate as many of them are, were written when a page or two of manuscript rost him hours of painful exertion. Once in 1822, when Cabell had urged him to write a number of letters to influential gentlemen in aid of one of their schemes, he replied, "You do not know, my dear sir, how great is my physical inability to write. The joints of my right wrist and fingers, in consequence of an ancient dislocation, are become so stiffened, that I can write but at the pace of a snail. The copying our report and my letter lately sent to the governor, being seven pages only, employed me laboriously a whole week. The letter I am now writing you" (filling one large sheet) "has taken me two days. A letter of a page or two costs me a day of labor, and of painful labor."

But some of these letters were among the best he ever wrote. In his endeavors to reconcile the people of Virginia to the cost of maintaining a common school in each "ward" of every county, he showed all his old tact and skill. His "ward" was to be "so laid off as to comprehend the number of inhabitants necessary to furnish a captain's company of militia," - five hundred persons of all ages and either sex. The great difficulty was to convince the average planter that he, the rich man of the ward, had an interest in contributing to the common school, the teacher of which was to receive a hundred and fifty dollars a year, and "board round." Jefferson met this

objection in a letter that still possesses convincing power. And his argument comes home to the inhabitants of the great cities now rising everywhere, and destined to contain half of the population of this continent. What are they but a narrow rim of elegance and plenty around a vast and deep abyss of squalor, into which a certain portion of the dainty children of the smiling verge are sure to slide at last? How eloquent are these quiet words of Jefferson, when we apply them to our own city! Would that I could give them wings that would carry round the world a passage so simple, so humane, so wise, and so adroit !

"And will the wealthy individual have no retribution? And what will this be? 1. The peopling his neighborhood with honest, useful, and enlightened citizens, understanding their own rights, and firm in their perpetuation. 2. When his descendants become poor, which they generally do within three generations (no law of primogeniture now perpetuating wealth in the same families), their children will be educated by the then rich; and the little advance he now makes to poverty, while rich himself, will be repaid by the then rich to his descendants when become poor, and thus give them a chance of rising again. This is a solid consideration, and should go home to the bosom of every parent. This will be seed sown in fertile ground. It is a provision for his family looking to distant times, and far in duration beyond that he has now in hand for them. Let every man count backwards in his own family, and see how many generations he can go, before he comes to the ancestor who made the fortune he now holds. Most will be stopped at the first generation; many at the second; few will reach the third; and not one in the State can go beyond the fifth.”

Like Franklin, he was not content with appealing only to the higher motives. State pride was a chord which he touched with effect. He reminded Virginians, that, before the Revolution, the mass of education in Virginia placed her with the foremost of her sister colonies; but now "the little we have we import, like beggars, from other States, or import their beggars to bestow on us their miserable crumbs." He pointed to Virginia's ancient friend and ally, Massachusetts, only one-tenth as large as Virginia, and the twenty-first state in the Union in size. But she has "more

influence in our confederacy than any other State in it." Why? "From her attention to education unquestionably. There can be no stronger proof that knowledge is power and that ignorance is weakness."

He did not live to see a State system of common schools established in Virginia. A scheme of his for maintaining in each county a circulating library was also in advance of that generation, and had no great results in his own day.

But the two conspirators against ignorance had one memorable and glorious triumph. They succeeded in planting on Virginia soil a university, unique in two particulars. In all other American colleges then existing, the controlling influence was wielded by one of the learned professions; and all students were compelled to pursue a course of studies originally prescribed by that one profession for its own perpetuation. In the University of Virginia, founded through the influence and persistent tact of Jefferson, seconded at every stage by the zeal and ability of Cabell, all the professions are upon an equality, and every student is free to choose what knowledge he will acquire, and what neglect. It is a secularized university. Knowledge and scholarship are there neither rivals nor enemies, but equal and independent sources of mental power, inviting all, compelling none. Jefferson's intention was to provide an assemblage of schools and professors, where every student could find facilities for getting just what knowledge he wanted, without being obliged to pretend to pursue studies for which he had neither need nor taste. He desired, also, to test his favorite principle of trusting every individual to the custody of his own honor and conscience. It was his wish that students should stand on the simple footing of citizens, amenable only to the laws of their State and country, and that the head of the faculty should be a regularly commissioned magistrate, to sit in judgment on any who had violated those laws. This part of the scheme he was compelled, at a critical moment, to drop; but he did so only to avoid the peril of a more important failure. But he held to the principle. He would have no espionage upon the students; but left all of them free to improve their opportunities in their own way, provided the laws of the land were not broken, and the rights of others were respected. His trust was in the conscience and good sense of the students, in the moral influence of a superior corps of instructors, and in an elevated public opinion.

Jefferson was forty years in getting the University of Virginia established. Long he hoped that the ancient college of William and Mary could be freed from limiting conditions and influences, and be developed into a true university. As late as 1820 he was still striving for a "consolidation" of the old college with the forming institution in Albemarle. It was already apparent that the want of America was, not new institutions of learning, but a suppression of one-half of those already existing, and the "survival of the fittest," enriched by the spoils of the weak. But William and Mary, like most of the colleges of Christendom, is constricted by the ignorance and vanity of "benefactors," who gave their money to found an institution for all time, and annexed conditions to their gifts which were suited only to their own time. Nothing remained but to create a new institution. In 1794 a strange circumstance occurred, which gave him hopes of attaining his object by a short cut. Several of the professors in the College of Geneva, Switzerland, dissatisfied with the political condition of their canton, united in proposing to Mr. Jefferson to remove in a body to Virginia, and continue their vocation under the protection and patronage of the legislature. On sounding influential members, he discovered that the project was premature, and it was not pressed. The coming of Dr. Priestley, followed by some learned friends. of his and other men of science, revived his hopes. A letter to Priestley in 1800 shows that the great outlines of the scheme were then fully drawn in his mind. He told the learned exile that he desired to found in the centre of the State a "university on a plan so broad and liberal and modern as to be worth patronizing with the public support, and be a temptation to the youth of other States to come and drink of the cup of knowledge, and fraternize with us." He proposed that the professors should follow no other calling; and he hoped "to draw from Europe the first characters in science by considerable temptations." He asked Dr. Priestley to draw up a plan, and favor him with advice and suggestions. During his presidency, he still embraced opportunities to increase his knowledge of such institutions. After his retirement, the war of 1812 interposed obstacles; but, from the peace of 1815 to the close of his life, the University of Virginia was the chief subject of his thoughts, and the chief object of his labors.

It is not difficult to begin the most arduous enterprise. How