tee on foreign correspondence appointed by Congress on November 29, 1775, could hardly expect any aid from European nations. But when the cause which we submitted to a "candid world" took the form of independence help came. As soon as Louis XVI's government heard that the American colonies had declared themselves free it proposed that France and Spain should begin war against Great Britain. Men and money began to come to us from France. In October our agent in Paris, Silas Deane, could ship to America a large amount of ammunition, thirty thousand muskets, and clothing for twenty thousand soldiers. The commission from the independent United States of America, which superseded Deane's agency in Paris at the close of 1776, made steady progress toward the negotiation of our first treaties of alliance and commerce. Jefferson had been asked to serve on this commission with Franklin and Deane, but another service, which we shall study in our next chapter, appealed to him with a clearer call, and Arthur Lee was substituted in his place. That foreign nations helped us for the destruction of the British Empire rather than for the establishment of the American Republic did not affect the value of their aid. What that value was every student of the American Revolution knows. Whether or not we should have eventually established our independence without the help of France it is impossible to say. So judicious a

scholar as Mr. Lecky believes that most of the States would have given up the struggle without this help. Although New England and Virginia might have kept up a valiant but desperate resistance for a time, "the peace party would soon have gained the ascendancy and the colonies have been reunited to the mother country."

The Declaration of Independence was a fitting climax to Jefferson's splendid campaign for political freedom, and would alone suffice to place him high in the honor-roll of the founders of the American state. It was a masterly condensation of the Summary View and the Reply to Lord North, thrown into the form of a stirring manifesto to the American people and the world at large. And its influence on America and the world at large has been beyond calculation. Even England herself, led astray for the moment by false counsels, was helped by its plain and ruthless lesson to regain the path of justice; for the Declaration was an appeal from an England badly governed to an England to be better.. governed. It was the voice of Milton speaking again. There is no need to introduce Rousseau and the French philosophers of the eighteenth century to explain Jefferson's language. "The natural rights of man' was a doctrine as old as the Roman law, and "government by consent of the governed" was the principle for which the "republicans" of the seventeenth century had fought their battle of four

score years against the Stuart kings. It is doubtful whether Jefferson had read a word of Rousseau's Contrat social in 1776, but for a decade he had been a profound student of Coke and Milton, of Harrington and Locke.1

To the end of his long career of varied service to the American Republic Jefferson continued faithful to the doctrine of government by the consent of the governed, of confidence in the people to shape their own political destinies, of liberty as a gift of God and not a grant from monarchs. On the approach of the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence the city of Washington invited Jefferson to take part in its celebration. He had entered his eighty-fourth year and was too feeble to accept the invitation. But in his letter of regret written to Mayor Weightman on June 24, 1826— the last letter of his life—he renewed his pledge to the doctrines of the immortal Declaration and summoned his countrymen to "an undiminished devotion" to its principles: "May it be to the world what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind

1 The influence of John Locke's Two Treatises on Government, published at the time of the English revolution of 1688–9, is traceable even to words and phrases in the Declaration. Compare the examples cited from Locke's second Treatise by Professor Channing, in his History of the United States, vol. III, p. 10.

themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government."

On the granite obelisk which he had chosen for his monument, Jefferson asked to have three of his services to the cause of liberty inscribed. The first was: AUTHOR OF THE DECLARATION OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE.

CHAPTER III

THE REFORM OF THE VIRGINIA CODE

The Gothic idea that we are to look backwards instead of forwards for the improvement of the human mind, and to recur to the annals of our ancestors for what is most perfect in government, in religion, and in learning, is worthy of those bigots in religion and government by whom it has been recommended, and whose purpose it would answer. (Jefferson to Joseph Priestley, January 27, 1800.)

"LIBERTY and union, now and forever, one and inseparable!" Since Daniel Webster pronounced the marriage banns between liberty and union, and Abraham Lincoln stopped the action for divorce, the tie has remained consecrated and inviolable in our American democracy. But Liberty was a jealous maiden, needing many years of wooing before she would consent to Union, and dwelling long even after her grudging consent was given on the fear of "losing her freedom." It was liberty, not union, for which our fathers fought in the Revolution. Union was the necessary means, for unless the patriots of Massachusetts and Virginia, of Pennsylvania and Georgia, made common cause, they could not hope to win. But the union was only the sum of its parts, a federation, and the Congress a central board of direction, without any specified powers or sanctioned authority, until a few months before the