the many who "by his dexterity have been cheated out of their rights and reduced to beggary." Certainly not a very just comparison! Ten years later, in his Memoir, he chides "the present Congress" for its garrulousness, but adds in extenuation: "How could it be otherwise in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?" Still, even if Jefferson was not a very enthusiastic lawyer, his success as an attorney. was far above the average of his day. Henry S. Randall, his most painstaking and exhaustive biographer, has compiled a table of his cases in the general court during his seven years of practice. They amount to about a thousand, and the average yearly income from them was not far from three thousand dollars.

In the midst of his law studies in Wythe's office Jefferson came of age, and celebrated the event in characteristic fashion by planting an avenue of trees at Shadwell. He was now master of the estate, for by the laws of entail and primogeniture—laws which he himself abolished in the reform of the Virginia law code the oldest son inherited the undivided property. Jefferson was an ideal figure for a landed proprietor. He was passionately fond of country life, riding his beloved horses at early morn over his broad acres, watching with perennial enthusiasm the budding of the trees and the ripening

of the vegetables, noting in his closely written account-books every item of income and outgo. His native gifts of intellect and grace of manner, supplemented by a remarkably fine education, made him a charming host; while his genuine humanitarian interest extended to the meanest slave on his estate. From the day of his majority to the day of his death, more than threescore years later, this tall, sandy-haired master, with eyes "flecked with hazel," was loved by his family, his friends, and his servants as few were loved even in Virginia, the land of loyal devotions.

With his new manorial dignity Jefferson took up the duties of a country squire. He became a justice of the peace and a vestryman of the parish. He also initiated his lifelong crusade for the improvement of material conditions through applied science, by starting a petition to the legislature for making the Rivanna River a navigable highway for the commerce of Albemarle County.

Just at the moment when Jefferson was coming into his inheritance the curtain rose on the prologue to the tragedy of the American Revolution. George Grenville was prime minister in a cabinet which Macaulay characterizes as the worst that had governed England since the revolution of 1688. In March, 1764, Grenville began to put into operation a plan for the taxation of the American colonies, with the threefold object of increasing the British

revenue to meet the large debt contracted in the French war, of restoring the vigor of the Navigation Acts, which bound the commerce of the colonies by rules imposed by the British Parliament, and of raising money to defray the expenses of "defending, protecting, and securing the King's dominion in America,"

so happily enlarged" by the expulsion of the French from the St. Lawrence and Mississippi valleys. In addition to various tariff duties levied by the Act of April, 1764, the ministry announced its intention of imposing on the American colonies the next year an "internal tax," that is, a tax not on their foreign trade, which as an "imperial" matter the colonists had been willing, at least in theory, to concede, but a tax on their ordinary business transactions within the colonies themselves. All kinds of legal and public documents, including wills, deeds, mortgages, bills of sale, promissory notes, contracts, as well as pamphlets, newspapers, almanacs, and playing-cards, were to be subject to stamp-duties ranging from three pence to ten pounds.

King George approved the vigorous policy of his new ministers. In proroguing Parliament on the 19th of April—a day made memorable on Lexington Green and at Concord Bridge eleven years later by certain events not unconnected with the stamp-tax -George III complimented his ministers on "the wise regulations" which they had adopted "to augment the public revenues and unite the interests of

the most distant possessions of the crown." While the King was speaking Thomas Jefferson was perhaps musingly inspecting the condition of his newly planted shade-trees at Shadwell.

The next spring the Stamp Act was passed through Parliament, with scarcely any debate in the House of Commons and without a division in the Lords. News of the act reached America in May, as the session of the Virginia Burgesses was nearing its close. The representatives of the old conservative families, the Pendletons, Wythes, Blands, and Randolphs, with all the "cyphers of aristocracy," as Jefferson later called them, were willing to dissolve without a protest. There was something sacred and inviolate to them in an act of Parliament. But Patrick Henry, delegate from the upland county of Louisa, spoke out. He offered resolutions condemning the Stamp Act, declaring that the right of taxing the colonies lay in their own legislative assemblies, and that any attempt of the British Parliament to usurp this right tended to the destruction of liberties both here and in England. He supported his resolutions in a fiery speech which drew cries of "Treason!" from the consternated aristocrats. And he carried his point by a single vote.

Thomas Jefferson was standing in the lobby at the door of the hall of the burgesses when Henry made his speech, and was still under the spell of that Homeric eloquence when his kinsman, Peyton

Randolph, attorney-general of the colony, came storming out of the door with a vow that he would have given a hundred guineas for the one vote needed to kill the resolutions. It was a red-letter day in Jefferson's life one of those rare moments whose influence lasts to the grave. Forty-five years later Jefferson wrote to his friend William Wirt, who was preparing a biography of Patrick Henry: "By those resolutions Mr. Henry took the lead out of the hands of those who had heretofore guided the proceedings of the House. . . . Subsequent events favored the policy of the bolder spirits. . . with whom I went on all points."

Four years later Jefferson was elected to the House of Burgesses from Albemarle County. Much water had flowed under the political bridges meanwhile. The British Parliament had repealed the Stamp Act in 1766, but, under the spur of Charles Townshend's mocking provocation, had returned to the charge the next year and imposed a fresh set of duties on colonial imports, together with a declaration of the legality of writs of assistance, and a general tightening up of the customs control. Massachusetts had protested in a circular letter to the colonies, drawn up by Samuel Adams, and Lord Hillsborough had ordered the unruly legislature of Massachusetts, through Governor Bernard, to rescind the letter. The legislature refused to obey by a vote of ninety-two to seventeen, and was dissolved