Chapter III 1784-1789 I

IN 1784 John Adams and Benjamin Franklin were in Europe, as ministers plenipotentiary to negotiate treaties of commerce, struggling to revive the wilted credit of America and galvanize its palsied trade. On the seventh of May, the Congress resolved to add a third minister to its foreign staff. Age and infirmity were telling on Franklin; he wanted to come home, and it would be a hard matter to fill his place. John Adams could not be transferred to Paris; he was hardly the man to get on with the French, and he was doing so well in London that his removal would make, practically, two holes in the foreign service instead of one. Of the few men available—for there was no great competition among able men for this kind of position, or indeed for any position under the new Government—Mr. Jefferson seemed best qualified. Madison thought he would be willing to serve; he had already shown himself willing to go abroad as one of the peace commissioners, and it seemed likely, as Madison said, that “the death of Mrs. Jefferson had probably changed the sentiments of Mr. Jefferson with regard to public life.” This new appointment was less interesting than the place on the peace commission, and from the point of view of the practical politician it led nowhere; still, he might be induced to accept it.

The appointment really suited him, though for reasons not contemplated by the Congress. He was drifting into a bad way. For a year and a half, since his wife’s death, he had been melancholy and despondent, giving free rein to his natural turn for solitude. His only hold on public affairs was through his seat in Congress, where he became more than ever a silent member. Despondency aggravated his contempt for the ineptitute of this body, and contempt, in turn, reacted on his despondency. The Congress, he says, “was little numerous but very contentious. Day after day was wasted on the most unimportant questions.” The behaviour of “those afflicted with the morbid rage of debate” caused him to regard it as “really more questionable than may at first be thought, whether Bonaparte’s dumb legislature which said nothing and did much may not be preferable to one which talks much and does nothing.” Listless and depressed as he was, however, he did whatever came to his hand to do. Among other matters, he proposed the present monetary unit of the United States, the dollar, and the basis of the present coinage, namely: the ten-dollar gold piece, the silver dollar, the silver ten-cent piece and the copper penny. He drafted an ordinance for the temporary government of the Northwestern Territory, inserting an anti-slavery clause which was struck out by the Congress on the narrow margin of one vote. The Congress also struck out part of the provisions for admission of new States. Mr. Jefferson’s draft not only established the boundaries of these States, but did not leave even their names to “the consent of the governed.” One was to be called Pelisipia; another “within the peninsula formed by the lakes and waters of Michigan, Huron, St. Clair and Erie, shall be called Cherronesus”; another, Metropotamia; another, Polypotamia; and so on. The Congress put its shoulder manfully under this nomenclature, and heaved it out of the bill.

The appointment to France was not precisely a sinecure, yet it was not exacting. It meant prying open the French market to American rice, salt fish, salt meat, fish-oil and tobacco, on as favourable terms as possible, and getting a free entry for American products into the French West Indies. Important as it was, it was nothing that a person could work at week in and week out. Mr. Jefferson saw in it a prospect of profitable leisure, which he had his own notions about employing. His ideas are exhibited in a set of travelling notes, which he prepared later on the strength of his own experience, for Messrs. Rutledge and Shippen’s semi-official tour of Europe in 1788:

General Observations

On arriving at a town, the first thing is to buy the plan of the town, and the book noting its curiosities. Walk round the ramparts when there are any, go to the top of a steeple to have a view of the town and its environs.

When you are doubting whether a thing is worth the trouble of going to see, recollect that you will never again be so near it, that you may repent the not having seen it, but can never repent having seen it. But there is an opposite extreme, too, that is, the seeing too much. A judicious selection is to be aimed at, taking care that the indolence of the moment have no influence in the decision. Take care particularly not to let the porters of churches, cabinets, etc., lead you through all the little details of their profession, which will load the memory with trifles, fatigue the attention, and waste that and your time. It is difficult to confine these people to the few objects worth seeing and remembering. They wish for your money, and suppose you give it the more willingly the more they detail to you. . . . The people you will naturally see the most of will be tavern keepers, valets de place and postilions. These are the hackneyed rascals of every country. Of course they must never be considered when we calculate the national character.

Objects of Attention for an American

1. Agriculture. Everything belonging to this art, and whatever has a near relation to it. Useful or agreeable animals which might be transported to America. Species of plants for the farmer’s garden, according to the climate of the different States.

2. Mechanical arts, so far as they respect things necessary in America, and inconvenient to be transported thither ready-made, such as forges, stone-quarries, boats, bridges (very especially), etc., etc.

3. Lighter mechanical arts, and manufactures. Some of these will be worth a superficial view; but circumstances rendering it impossible that America should become a manufacturing country during the time of any man now living, it would be a waste of attention to examine these minutely.

4. Gardens. Peculiarly worth the attention of an American, because it is the country of all others where the noblest gardens may be made without expense. We have only to cut out the superabundant plants.

5. Architecture. Worth great attention. As we double our numbers every twenty years, we must double our houses. Besides, we build of such perishable materials that one-half of our houses must be rebuilt in every space of twenty years, so that in that time houses are to be built for three-fourths of our inhabitants. It is, then, among the most important arts; and it is desirable to introduce taste into an art which shows so much.

6. Painting. Statuary. Too expensive for the state of wealth among us. It would be useless therefore, and preposterous, for us to make ourselves connoisseurs in those arts. They are worth seeing, but not studying.

7. Politics of each country, well worth studying so far as respects internal affairs. Examine their influence on the happiness of the people. Take every possible occasion for entering into the houses of the labourers and especially at the moment of their repast; see what they eat, how they are clothed, whether they are obliged to work too hard; whether the government or their landlord takes from them an unjust proportion of their labour; on what footing stands the property they call their own, their personal liberty, etc., etc.

8. Courts. To be seen as you would see the Tower of London or menagerie of Versailles with their lions, tigers, hyænas, and other beasts of prey, standing in the same relation to their fellows. A slight acquaintance with them will suffice to show you that under the most imposing exterior, they are the weakest and worst part of mankind.

II

Mr. Jefferson left for Europe from the port of Boston by the merchant sailing-vessel Ceres on the fifth of July, 1784, taking with him his oldest daughter Martha, and “the new fiddle” which he had originally contemplated purchasing in Italy. In 1771 he had seen with a hankering eye a magnificent violin in possession of a shoestring relative, one of the innumerable Randolph connexion, living in Williamsburg. John Randolph also looked covetously at certain books in Mr. Jefferson’s library. They could not agree. Mr. Jefferson could not bring himself to part with his books, nor John Randolph the violin. They finally devised an agreement for a kind of posthumous bargain or gamble; an iron-clad document from which there was neither escape nor appeal. It was attested by as many as seven witnesses, and duly recorded by the clerk of the General Court:

October 11th, 1771.

It is agreed between John Randolph, esq., of the city of Williamsburg, and Thomas Jefferson of the County of Albemarle, that in case the said John shall survive the said Thomas, that the Exr’s or Adm’rs of the said Thomas shall deliver to the said John 800 pounds sterling of the books of the said Thomas, to be chosen by the said John, or if not books sufficient, the deficiency to be made up in money: And in case the said Thomas should survive the said John, that the Executors of the said John shall deliver to the said Thomas the violin which the said John brought with him into Virginia, together with all his music composed for the violin, or in lieu thereof if destroyed by any accident, 60 pounds sterling worth of books of the said John, to be chosen by the said Thomas. In witness whereof the said John and Thomas have hereunto subscribed their names and affixed their seals the day and year above written.

John Randolph (L.S.)
Th. Jefferson (L.S.)

Sealed and delivered in fresence of

G. Wythe,	Will. Drew,
Tho’s. Everand,	Richard Starke,
P. Henry, Jr.,	Wm. Johnson,
Ja. Steptoe.

Death seemed far off, however, and the said Thomas was impatient to get his itching fingers on the fiddle. He appears not to have pressed the matter on John Randolph, but neither does he seem ever to have lost sight of it. After four years—whether by force of being temporarily hard up, or wearied by Mr. Jefferson’s quiet pertinacity, or for whatever reason—John Randolph finally weakened. Mr. Jefferson’s pocket account-book carries the entry, under date of the seventeenth of August, “Delivered to Carter Braxton an order on the Treasurer in favour of J. Randolph, Att’y-General, for £13, the purchase-money for his violin. This dissolves our bargin recorded in the General Court, and revokes a legacy of £100 sterling to him now standing in my will, which was made in consequence of that bargain.”

So, with his little daughter and his violin, Mr. Jefferson set out. His journey up from his home to Boston, where his ship lay, was a matter of nearly two months, because he wished to get acquainted with the principal interests of the Eastern States, “informing myself of the state of commerce of each.” Heretofore he had only a hearsay acquaintance with these matters, no more than would come in the way of any intelligent Virginian planter. He made a leisurely progress through New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and Rhode Island, wrestling valiantly with the different State currencies as he went along. His pocket account-book shows a reasonable ground for gratitude that in all his wide range of early studies, mathematics was “ever my favorite one.” With “New York currency, Dollars 8/” and “Connecticut, Dollars 6/” and “Rhode Island State” currency at still another rate of sterling exchange, paying for a dinner or a night’s lodging was an appalling business. He reached Boston on the eighteenth of June, deposited his heavy luggage, and then left for a side trip of two weeks in New Hampshire and Vermont.

The voyage from Boston to the English port of Cowes was uncommonly fast—twenty-one days. Mr. Jefferson made his usual thrifty use of it by studying navigation. He had nothing else to do, and one can never know by what off-chance new learning will some day come handy. He calculated courses, read charts, took the sun, and kept a workmanlike log, becoming a pretty fair theoretical navigator by the end of the voyage. On landing at Cowes, he got on as far as Portsmouth, where his poor little daughter, seasick and bored, having had no special interest in navigation to sustain her against ship’s fare, discomfort and tedium, took to her bed. After looking out for her as best he could for three days, Mr. Jefferson capitulated to the distrusted profession by calling in a physician, a Dr. Meek, who charged him two guineas sterling for two visits. Towards the end of July, Patsy had picked herself up enough to face the last leg of her journey, and on the thirtieth she and her father set out on the wretched crossing from Portsmouth to Havre.

Like all green travellers, Mr. Jefferson learned by experience as he went along. Practically a vegetarian, fond of fruit and nuts, he invested heavily in these luxuries during his first few days on land, welcoming the change from the restricted diet of the ship. He bought a couple of shillings worth of nuts and a good deal of fruit as soon as he landed in England, and he did the same at Havre. Then, in about the time it would normally take for a brisk run of tourist’s summer-complaint to set in, these entries in his account-book abruptly cease, and he seems hardly to have eaten another nut or piece of fruit for five years.

The entries for charity run a like course. Mr. Jefferson was always so open-handed that, in Philadelphia especially, his easiness became known and he was greatly pestered by beggars. When he had no money with him, he would borrow for the purpose. An item put down in 1784, for instance, records a joint investment with Monroe in an opportunity of this kind, which probably turned up as they were walking together on the street. “March 7. Borrowed Colo. Monroe 4/2—gave in charity 4/2, remember to credit him half.” But although American cities spawned a measure of distress in those days, there was hardly such a thing known as hopeless involuntary poverty. In 1782, when Mr. Jefferson had already seen a good deal of American town life, he wrote in reply to the queries of the Marquis de Barbé-Marbois, “From Savannah to Portsmouth you will seldom meet a beggar. In the larger towns, indeed, they sometimes present themselves. These are usually foreigners who have never obtained a settlement in any parish. I never yet saw a native American begging in the streets or highways.” There was always the land for them to turn to, and with a little temporary tiding-over they would soon be on their own feet. “We have no paupers,” Mr. Jefferson wrote Thomas Cooper as late as 1814, “the old and crippled among us who possess nothing and have no families to take care of them, being too few to merit notice as a separate section of society or to affect a general estimate.”

But as soon as he set foot in France, Mr. Jefferson faced the real thing in involuntary poverty. After a year, he writes despondently to an American correspondent that “of twenty millions of people supposed to be in France, I am of the opinion there are nineteen millions more wretched, more accursed in every circumstance of human existence than the most conspicuously wretched individual of the whole United States.” The people had been expropriated from the land, and huddled into vast exploitable masses. “The property [i.e., the land] of this country is absolutely concentrated in a very few hands, having revenues of from half a million guineas a year downward”; and the consequence was that the majority lived merely on sufferance. Involuntary poverty, one might say, was so highly integrated as to erect mendicancy into an institution. This was new to Mr. Jefferson. “I asked myself what could be the reason that so many should be permitted to beg who are willing to work, in a country where there is a very considerable proportion of uncultivated lands,” and his conclusion was that “whenever there is in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural rights. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on.”

However, this was France’s problem, not his and not America’s—thank Heaven. He writes in a fervent strain to Monroe, “My God! how little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy. I confess I had no idea of it myself.” America had no end of land, and hence no problem of poverty. Nevertheless, he was just now in France, and France’s swarming paupers were nagging him at every turn. What could one do? Out of habit, he did for a while as he had always done; he gave away small amounts here and there on the moment, without question, as he happened to be importuned. This worked well in America; it really did some good, and at worst it was only an occasional matter. But here it did no good and was a matter of every hour in the day. Aside from its doing no good, moreover, one was so often swindled. The economic system that bred mendicancy also bred roguery, and there were many rogues among the mendicants. They too were very much to be pitied, no doubt, but to be taken in by them only encouraged them, and they were an incessant pest. The “hackneyed rascals” of France were even waiting at the wharf at Havre; the account-book takes note of the demands of a swindling commissionaire: “Broker attend^g me to Commandant 6 f.” The upshot was that after a couple of weeks of indiscriminate giving, he shut down on charity, save where he knew something about the applicant, as when he records giving “the poor woman at Têtebout 12 f.”

III

He found much to please him, however, in his new surroundings; he was especially attracted by the people’s natural sense, so much in accord with his own, of social life and manners. “The roughnesses of the human mind are so thoroughly rubbed off with them that it seems as if one might glide through a whole life among them without a jostle.” He had little trouble, even, with the degeneration of this quality into the official politesse sterile et rampante, the defensive formalism of the diplomat and statesman. The case-hardened old Foreign Minister, Vergennes, infirm and tired but clear-headed, could still match protective coloration with any diplomat put up against him. The diplomatic corps warned Mr. Jefferson that he was a formidable old fellow, “wary and slippery in his diplomatic intercourse.” All this might be true, no doubt, when he was playing the game by the rules “with those whom he knew to be slippery and double-faced themselves.” But Mr. Jefferson had no axe to grind, in the diplomatic sense. He was not a propagandist, as Franklin had been; he was an honest broker, not in crowns, colonies and protectorates, but in sound commodities like salt codfish, tobacco and potash. As soon therefore as Vergennes “saw that I had no indirect views, practiced no subtleties, meddled in no intrigues, pursued no concealed object, I found him as frank, as honourable, as easy of access to reason, as any man with whom I had ever done business; and I must say the same of his successor, Montmorin, one of the most honest and worthy of human beings.”

His enthusiasm was kindled at once by the contemplation of French proficiency in the arts and sciences. The music of Paris, which at that time was perhaps at the height of an unmusical people’s possibilities, was so much better than anything he had ever heard that he was delighted by it as “an enjoyment the deprivation of which with us [he writes this to an American correspondent] cannot be calculated. I am almost ready to say it is the only thing which from my heart I envy them, and which in spite of all the authority of the Decalogue I do covet.” He is without words to tell how much he enjoys their architecture, sculpture and painting. In science, he discovers that their literati “are half a dozen years before us. Books, really good, acquire just reputation in that time, and so become known to us and communicate to us all their advances in knowledge.” America, however, really misses nothing by being behindhand. Having few publishers and presses, American intelligence is saved the chance of suffocation under huge masses of garbage, such as are shot from the many presses of France. “Is not this delay compensated to us by our being placed out of reach of that swarm of nonsensical publications which issues daily from a thousand presses and perishes almost in issuing?”

Yet, making the most of all that was good in French life, admiring its virtues, delighting oneself in its amenities, one could not feel oneself properly compensated for the missing sense of freedom. There was no freedom in France, and therefore there was no real happiness. The immense majority was in bondage to its masters; the masters were in bondage to vices which were the natural fruit of irresponsibility, and which kept them in a condition really worse and more hopeless than that of those whom they exploited. “I find the general fate of humanity here most deplorable. The truth of Voltaire’s observation offers itself perpetually, that every man here must be either the hammer or the anvil.” Even the sense of taste and manners, so admirable, so interesting and prepossessing, is superficial and ineffectual in the absence of liberty. It controlled polite usages; it made imperative “all those little sacrifices of self which really render European manners amiable and relieve society from the disagreeable scenes to which rudeness often subjects it.” It held the minor routine of life in a generally agreeable course. “In the pleasures of the table they are far before us,” temperate, fastidious, discriminating. “I have never yet seen a man drunk in France, even among the lowest of the people.” All this was much to the good, and “a savage of the mountains of America” might well look on it with the keenest envy, perceiving how profoundly the fresh and simple charms of his native society might be enhanced by even this limited play of the sense of taste and manners.

But it was not enough. Good taste did not see eye to eye with justice in viewing the social structure of France as “a true picture of that country to which they say we shall pass hereafter, and where we are to see God and his angels in splendour, and crowds of the damned trampled under their feet.” Such a civilization was not only iniquitous, but essentially low. Good taste did not ennoble the pursuits of the privileged minority. “Intrigues of love occupy the younger, and those of ambition the elder part of the great.” This was not only vicious, but vulgar. To a man for whom conduct was three-fourths of life and good taste nine-tenths of conduct, this failure in the primary sanctions of taste was peculiarly repulsive. The rough society of America was more hopeful. “I would wish my countrymen to adopt just as much of European politeness” as might sweeten and temper their whole-someness, and mould them into a nation of Fauquiers. But however far from realization that millennial dream might be, “I am savage enough to prefer the woods, the wilds and the independence of Monticello to all the brilliant pleasures of this gay capital. I shall therefore rejoin myself to my native country with new attachments and with exaggerated esteem for its advantages.”

Europe, especially, was no place for young Americans; they were sure to go bad under its influence. Sending a youth to Europe for an education was utter futility. “If he goes to England, he learns drinking, horse-racing and boxing. These are the peculiarities of English education. . . . He is fascinated with the privileges of the European aristocrats, and sees with abhorrence the lovely equality which the poor enjoy with the rich in his own country. . . . He recollects the voluptuary dress and arts of the European women, and pities and despises the chaste affections and simplicity of those of his own country.” Summing up a long and earnest disquisition on this topic, he declares that “the consequences of foreign education are alarming to me as an American.” Thinking of the Wythes, Franklins, Rittenhouses, Adamses, Pendletons and Madisons of his acquaintance, urging his correspondent to cast an eye over America to see “who are the men of most learning, of most eloquence, most beloved by their countrymen, and most trusted and promoted by them,” he assures him that they are “those who have been educated among them, and whose manners, morals and habits are perfectly homogeneous with those of the country.”

IV

Mr. Jefferson regarded with profound distrust and disfavour the phenomenon of the political woman, which he here confronted for the first time. After four years’ experience he writes to President Washington that without the evidence of one’s own eyes one could hardly “believe in the desperate state to which things are reduced in this country from the omnipotence of an influence which, fortunately for the happiness of the sex itself, does not endeavour to extend itself in our country beyond the domestic line.” He was continually shocked by the coarseness and vulgarity, let alone the scandalousness, of the custom which permitted women in search of favours not only to visit public officials, but to visit them alone, without the presence of a third person to guard the proprieties; and he was outraged to observe that “their solicitations bid defiance to laws and regulations.” The easy-going Franklin had been enough of an opportunist to accept this custom and turn it to the profit of his country. In a good cause he was not above doing some things that neither John Adams nor Mr. Jefferson would do; Adams, as a result of a “process of moral reasoning,” and Mr. Jefferson out of sheer repugnance. Mr. Jefferson was little tempted; he was not the type that women set their cap for. Besides, even a riggish French noblewoman could hardly throw a glamour of romance over so prosaic an interest as the Franco-American trade in fish-oil and salt cod. Still, he could not quite avoid these women; he owed them civility, and he punctiliously paid the debt. He disliked Mme. de Staël, but having been kind to him she was not to be snubbed; nor yet was she to be courted for her youthful charms—she was then twenty-one—or for being the daughter of Neckar. He moved in her social circle with the high step and arched back of feline circumspection, and it does not appear that she ever took his attitude as a challenge to her hankering for conquest. After his return to America he wrote a kind of bread-and-butter letter to several French ladies who had made something of him in a social way; and in these, at the safe distance of three thousand miles, he risks a few ceremonious compliments. He assures Mme. de Corny, whom he really liked, that her civilities were “greatly more than I had a right to expect, and they have excited in me a warmth of esteem which it was imprudent in me to have given way to for a person whom I was one day to be separated from.” In the Duchesse d’Auville’s character “I saw but one error; it was that of treating me with a degree of favour I did not merit.” Corking down his effervescent horror of the bas-bleu, he declares to the Duchesse de la Rochefoucault, with a touch of irony, that if her system of ethics and of government were generally adopted, “we should have no occasion for government at all”; and he expresses to the Comtesse d’Houdetot his rather attenuated gratitude for lionizing him in her salon, and begs her to accept “the homage of those sentiments of respect and attachment with which I have the honour to be, Madame la Comtesse, your most obedient and most humble servant.” This was all very well; the language of compliment and ceremony was always acceptable at its face value. It was good, one might say, for this day and train only. His reservations were well understood. Still, if French women must go in for politics, it was at least something that the younger ones coming on after Calonne’s régime were beginning to go in on the right side. “All the handsome young women of Paris are for the Tiers Etat,” he writes David Humphreys in 1789, on the outbreak of the revolution, “and this is an army more powerful in France than the 200,000 men of the King.” In an emergency any stick will do to beat a dog; and a reflective American might hold his nose and survey the prospect with equanimity, since it concerned another country than his own.

But for his own countrywomen such a prospect was wholly impracticable and impossible. “Our good ladies, I trust, have been too wise to wrinkle their foreheads with politics,” he writes anxiously to the dazzling and skittish queen of Philadelphia’s society, Mrs. William Bingham, “They are contented to soothe and calm the minds of their husbands returning ruffled from political debate.” Mrs. Bingham had ventured to suggest that even if the French upper classes were a loose lot and had no domestic virtues worth speaking of, an American woman might yet not find Paris utterly unbearable; indeed, she might manage to have rather a good time there. Mr. Jefferson gravely assures her that she is mistaken about this. “Recollect the women of this capital, some on foot, some on horses and some in carriages, hunting pleasure in the streets, in routs and assemblies, and forgetting that they have left it behind them in their nurseries; compare them with our own countrywomen occupied in the tender and tranquil amusements of domestic life, and confess that it is a comparison of Americans and angels.” On its social side, the Jeffersonian system took little account of the individuality of women, and on its political side, it made no place for them. Assume, Mr. Jefferson wrote, that the republican principle were carried out in practice as far as it will go; assume such an extension of the town-meeting as would settle all public business in popular assembly, “there would yet be excluded from their deliberations: (1) Infants, until arrived at years of discretion. (2) Women, who, to prevent depravation of morals and ambiguity of issue, could not mix promiscuously in the public meetings of men. (3) Slaves.” Women, again, like infants and slaves, being devoid of rights both of will and property, were not only incompetent to an exercise of will in a popular assembly, but “of course could delegate none to the agent in a representative assembly.” Woman’s only chance at getting an interest represented would be through the attorneyship or brokerage of some male middleman, acting for her as a “qualified citizen.”

But why should it be otherwise? What individual interest could a woman have that she should prefer to maintain for herself, rather than trust a father or husband to maintain for her? “It is an honourable circumstance for man that the first moment he is at his ease, he allots the internal employments to his female partner and takes the external on himself.” Women have all the best of it under this arrangement, because their duties are so simple. They might be a little trying sometimes, but there is never any trouble about understanding them. “The happiness of your life now depends on the continuing to please a single person,” Mr. Jefferson wrote his daughter Martha at the time of her marriage. “To this all other objects must be secondary, even your love for me.” To his daughter Maria, on her marriage to John Eppes, he wrote, “Nothing can preserve affections uninterrupted but a firm resolution never to differ in will. . . . How light in fact is the sacrifice of any other wish when weighed against the affections of one with whom we are to pass our whole life.” It was all plain and straightforward. A woman should please the particular middleman who happened to be standing for the moment as her attorney to the world; her father first, then her husband or brother or guardian. She should bend her will to his. In return, all her relations to society would be attentively prescribed for her, and she would be adjusted to them considerately, affectionately, comfortably. No reasonable woman could ask more. “American women have the good sense to value domestic happiness above all other, and the art to cultivate it beyond all other”; they are not like the forward Frenchwomen who dangle about minister’s cabinets unattended, and piddle at visionary schemes of ethics and government. If now and then a renegade type turns up, she must be sent to the right-about. In the last year of his Presidency, Mr. Jefferson writes magisterially to Gallatin, his Secretary of the Treasury, “The appointment of a woman to office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I.”

Woman’s duty being so incomplex, and the grasp of it needing so little brains, the education of women was correspondingly simple; so simple, indeed, that one would not think much about it. Mr. Jefferson bent his mind to the theory and practice of education for nearly fifty years; yet at the age of seventy, he says that “a plan of female education has never been a subject of systematic contemplation with me. It has occupied my attention so far only as the education of my own daughters occasionally required.” Seeing that his girls were likely to live in a sparsely-settled agricultural country, he thought that for vocational reasons they ought to have a solid education “which might enable them, when become mothers, to educate their own daughters, and even to direct the course for sons, should their fathers be lost or incapable or inattentive.” Such few general thoughts as ever took rise from this experience are put down in a letter to a neighbour in Virginia. He finds that a great obstacle to good education for women is their inordinate passion for novels. In those who seek this release for the pent desire for romance, “the result is a bloated imagination, sickly judgment and disgust towards all the real businesses of life.” Some novels of a historical type, however, are well enough. “For a like reason, much poetry should not be indulged. Some is useful for forming taste and style”; Dryden and Pope, for example, and Thomson! French is indispensable. Music is “invaluable where a person has an ear.” Drawing is an innocent and engaging amusement, often useful, and “a qualification not to be neglected in one who is to become a mother and an instructor.” Dancing is a healthy and elegant exercise, a specific against social awkwardness, but an accomplishment of short use, “for the French rule is wise, that no lady dances after marriage . . . gestation and nursing leaving little time to a married lady when this exercise can be either safe or innocent.” Women must be taught to dress neatly at all hours, for vocational reasons. “A lady who has been seen as a sloven or slut in the morning,” he tells Martha, “will never efface the impression she has made, with all the dress and pageantry she can afterwards involve herself in. . . . I hope therefore, the moment you rise from bed, your first work will be to dress yourself in such style as that you may be seen by any gentleman without his being able to discover a pin amiss.” Finally, always for vocational reasons, women must be taught to wash themselves; it is the acme of impracticality for them to go dirty, since “nothing is so disgusting to our sex as a want of cleanliness and delicacy in yours.”

Mr. Jefferson did his best by his daughters. He put Patsy in a convent school in Paris, where he bombarded her with letters in which the expression of a larvated love was, as usual, inhibited into a diffident formalism by the combination of natural reticence and a more or less puzzled sense of responsibility. “I rest the happiness of my life in seeing you beloved by all the world, which you will be sure to be if to a good heart you join those accomplishments so peculiarly pleasing in your sex.” That is about the best he can do, except by way of suggesting occupations for her leisure hours, and in this his fertility is endless. To be sure, her leisure hours were not many; they never had been many, even when she was at home. The year before she went abroad, her father had laid out the following schedule of her time;

From 8 to 10, practice music.

From 10 to 1, dance one day, and draw another.

From 1 to 2, draw on the day you dance, and write a letter the next day.

From 3 to 4, read French.

From 4 to 5, exercise yourself in music.

From 5 till bed-time, read English, write, etc.

In Paris he is continually anxious about her not having enough to do, and about a certain listlessness towards her duties, a kind of boredom. He has a harpsichord sent her from London; he tries to get her interested in the note of the nightingale, so that when she returns to Virginia she may compare it with that of the mocking-bird; he informs her all about the literary and historical associations of certain places in Italy and the South of France; he redoubles his solicitations towards the industrious life, urging her to remember that “a mind always employed is always happy. This is the true secret, the grand recipe, for felicity. The idle are the only wretched.” How could one doubt it? He himself had never been idle for an aggregate of twelve hours in his whole life, and in the large sense, he had always been happy; when Satan had approached him with the proverbial wares of mischief, they found a closed market. But while Martha did her best to realize upon her prescribed pursuits, they seemed for some reason to pass their dividends. She was interested in her father’s stories of the fountain of Vaucluse, the tomb of Laura and the château of Petrarch, but her interest was sentimental rather than antiquarian; they seemed to generate, if not “a sickly judgment and disgust towards all the real businesses of life,” at least a disturbing half-heartedness and irresolution about facing them. She tried to do everything in reason for the nightingales, but here again she did not find her father’s exhortations as animating as they should be. Presently, after looking over the prospects which the future seemed to hold in store for an amiable dreamy wench in her teens, Patsy decided that she would probably do well to dedicate the rest of her life to the service of God. She accordingly wrote her father for permission to enter the holy sisterhood. Two days afterward, he appeared at the convent and took her away, with no intimation either by word or manner that she had expressed any such wish; and as long as he lived he never once alluded to her request, nor did she. Thenceforth he kept her with him, mothering her younger sister, Maria; both returned to America with him; both fulfilled their destiny as their father’s daughters by becoming dutiful and assiduous wives, mothers, housekeepers; and they continued in the joy of these occupations as long as their strength held out.

V

Throughout the period of his ambassadorship, Mr. Jefferson found little doing in the way of business. Vergennes was polite, considerate, straightforward. They discussed one article of commerce after another, but could never come to much more than nominal terms. In the matter of rice, flour, fish, and “provisions of all sorts,” the French were doing quite well as they were. Their own colonies supplied them with indigo, and “they thought it better than ours.” They could make a good market for American peltry and furs, but the English were holding all the northwestern American posts, and therefore the supply of these commodities was effectively shut off. The only market that really amounted to anything was for tobacco. France was then buying two million livres’ worth of American tobacco every year; but most of it was bought in London, and “for what they bought in the United States, the money was still remitted to London by bills of exchange.” Mr. Jefferson suggested to Vergennes that this was not good business; that “if they would permit our merchants to sell this article freely, they would bring it here and take the returns on the spot, in merchandise, not money.” Vergennes had no trouble about seeing the point; he “observed that my proposition contained what doubtless was useful”; but political considerations stood in the way. In plain words, he could not admit American tobacco to the French ports without incurring a head-on collision with the Farmers-General.

The French crown had, some time before, turned over the business of tax-collection to private enterprise. The private company called the Farmers-General paid the King twenty-eight million livres flat revenue on tobacco, and assumed all the trouble and expense of reimbursing themselves out of the consumer. They had a similar monopoly on salt, and on certain tolls collected on agricultural products at the gates of French cities. As a rule, they collected what the traffic would bear; and hence in almost no time at all they grew up into the richest and most powerful institution in France—far too powerful for any minister to tackle with a proposition to give up one of their best monopolies. Vergennes put it gently “that it was always hazardous to alter arrangements of long standing and of such infinite combinations with the fiscal system.” He himself was quite for Mr. Jefferson’s proposals, but they would have to take their chances with Calonne, the Comptroller-General; and Calonne, as an honourable official, was properly scandalized at the suggestion that the good faith of the nation, pledged by implication to the Farmers-General, should in any way be tarnished. Later on, perhaps, when the Farmers-General had had time to turn around, it was not impossible that the royal understanding with them might be modified by some kind of compromise; but at present nothing could be done. Calonne knew which side his bread was buttered on. Mr. Jefferson remarked in reporting this matter to Congress, that “the influence of the Farmers-General has been heretofore found sufficient to shake a minister in his office,” and that if Calonne opposed the tobacco-monopoly, “the joint interests of France and America would be insufficient counterpoise in his favour,” and he would lose his place.

After a year and a half of this kind of shilly-shallying, Mr. Jefferson writes mournfully, “What a cruel reflection, that a rich country can not long be a free one!” Wherever his eyes rested, he saw the French producer labouring under “all the oppressions which result from the nature of the general government, and from that of their particular tenures, and of the seignorial government to which they are subject.” Government, in short, was, as Voltaire said, a mere device for taking money out of one man’s pocket and putting it into another’s. The European governments, he writes to Rutledge, are “governments of wolves over sheep.” All he saw confirmed him in the view which he had laid down at the age of thirty, in his paper on The Rights of British America, saying that “the whole art of government consists in the art of being honest”; and in the Declaration of Independence, saying that governments are instituted among men to secure certain inherent and inalienable rights, and that “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.”

A visit to England during this year stiffened his convictions. In February, 1786, John Adams sent for him to come over to London to assist in the negotiation of treaties with Portugal and Tripoli. Here he saw a population expropriated from the land, and existing at the mercy of industrial employers, with the enormous exactions of monopoly standing as a fixed charge upon the producer, though not so heavy as in France—the French producers “pay about one-half their produce in rent; the English, in general, about a third.” The British governmental system was steadfastly on the side of the landmonopolists who expropriated the people and of the industrialists who exploited them; it was really their agent. “The aristocracy of England, which comprehends the nobility, the wealthy commoners, the high grades of priesthood and the officers of government, have the laws and government in their hands [and] have so managed them as to reduce the eleemosynary class, or paupers, below the means of supporting life, even by labour. [They] have forced the labouring class, whether employed in agriculture or the arts, to the maximum of labour which the construction of the human body can endure, and to the minimum of food, and of the meanest kind, which will preserve it in life and in strength sufficient to perform its functions.” As for the paupers, they “are used as tools to maintain their own wretchedness, and to keep down the labouring portion by shooting them whenever the desperation produced by the cravings of their stomachs drives them into riots.” Over and above these patriotic duties, the paupers also “furnish materials for armies and navies to defend their country, exercise piracy on the ocean, and carry conflagration, plunder and devastation to the shores of all those who endeavour to withstand their aggressions. Such,” he concludes bitterly, “is the happiness of scientific England.”

Having this view of the English and French governments, Mr. Jefferson was always prompt to differentiate their character from that of their victims. The individuals of the English nation are “as faithful to their private engagements and duties, as honourable, as worthy, as those of any nation of earth,” and therefore the country “presents a singular phenomenon of an honest people whose constitution, from its nature, must render their government forever dishonest.” He had already remarked a similar distinction in favour of the French people, as bearing “the most benevolent, the most gay and amiable character of which the human form is susceptible,” and yet as “loaded with misery by kings, nobles and priests, and by them alone.” France is “the worst-governed country on earth,” and the British government “the most flagitious which has existed since the days of Philip of Macedon. . . . It is not only founded in corruption itself, but insinuates the same poison into the bowels of every other, corrupts its councils, nourishes factions, stirs up revolutions, and places its own happiness in fomenting commotions and civil wars among others, thus rendering itself truly the hostis humani generis.” The practical upshot of this state of things is, as he writes John Adams, that “as for France and England, with all their progress in science, the one is a den of robbers, and the other of pirates.”

Still, as an honest broker with goods to sell, Mr. Jefferson was disposed to lay aside his private opinions and deal with these people if he could. After all, nations must live, and to do so they must seek their advantage where they can find it. He asked no favours of the French ministry; he represented merely the enlightened self-interest of America, and was trying to elicit a response from theirs. He had no prejudices against the English Government that would stand out against being polite and pleasant about matters of reciprocal advantage. He was aware, as he said late in life, that “no two nations can be so helpful to each other as friends nor so hurtful as enemies”; and, indeed, if the English Government could only bring itself to “treat us with justice and equity, I should myself feel with great strength the ties which bind us together, of origin, language, laws and manners.” He had come late and reluctantly into the movement for American independence, believing, as most of the colonists did, that if they could get a working measure of economic independence, political independence was not worth the cost of a quarrel. “If I could permit myself to have national partialities,” he writes in 1812, “and if the conduct of England would have permitted them to be directed towards her, they would have been so.” And now, in his present capacity, as a peaceable commercial representative holding out the olive branch of profitable trade, he could clearly see that “a friendly, a just and a reasonable conduct on the part of the British might make us the main pillar of their prosperity and existence.” Why might not the British see it too? At all events, he would not be found at fault in the matter, now or ever, for the best of reasons. “As a political man, the English shall never find any passion in me either for or against them. Whenever their avarice of commerce will let them meet us fairly half way, I should meet them with satisfaction, because it would be for our benefit.”

But he could not do a hand’s turn in London; he was rebuffed everywhere. A witty saying has it that there is no such thing as good manners in England, but only the right and wrong kind of bad manners; and Mr. Jefferson was treated to a liberal display of both. He was presented to the King, as a matter of routine, and “it was impossible for anything to be more ungracious” than the sullen old maniac’s attitude. As for the Foreign Minister, who was then the Marquis of Caermarthen, to whom he was officially introduced by Adams, “the distance and disinclination which he betrayed in his conversation, the vagueness and evasions of his answers to us, confirmed me in the belief of their aversion to have anything to do with us.” The two ambassadors, however, delivered a memorandum of their proposals, “Mr. Adams not despairing as much as I did of its effect.” They never got within the gracious presence of the Foreign Minister again, though “we afterwards, by one or more notes, requested his appointment of an interview and conference, which, without directly declining, he evaded by pretences of other pressing occupations for the moment.” This went on for seven weeks, and then Mr. Jefferson gave his mission up as hopeless and left England, insula inhospitabilis, as Tacitus had tersely styled it two thousand years before; all he ever got out of Caermarthen being a stiff note in acknowledgment of his pour prendre congé, “wishing me a pleasant journey” back to Paris.

In the course of this experience, Mr. Jefferson became aware that the English were not merely biting off their nose to spite their face. Far otherwise; “the English think we can not prevent our countrymen from bringing our trade into their laps,” he wrote his old friend John Page. “A conviction of this determines them to make no terms of commerce with us. They say they will pocket our carrying trade as well as their own.” There was something in this. There is little sentiment of any kind in the course of trade, and no nationalism. “Merchants have no country,” Mr. Jefferson said. “The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.” American trade was drawn back into English channels after the Revolution by the irresistible attractions of price, quality and credit-facilities. The stupidity of the English Government lay in their refusal to recognize this tendency handsomely and lay down an enlightened doctrine of free trade with America, as John Adams kept trying to persuade them to do. Instead, they gruffly slapped their pockets, and treated Adams’s proposals with a porcine indifference that was a sure runner-up of economic war. “Ever since the accession of the present King of England,” Mr. Jefferson observes to Carmichael in 1787, “that court has done what common sense would have dictated not to do”; and he writes at the same time to John Adams, that “I never yet found any general rule for foretelling what the British will do, but that of examining what they ought not to do.” Moreover, the British Ministry had been keeping its press-agents busy throughout the decade since the war, in fomenting popular hatred of America. “You know well that that Government always kept a kind of standing army of news-writers, who, without any regard to truth or what should be like truth, invented and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. . . . No paper, therefore, comes out without a dose of paragraphs against America.” Nothing could be done about it; if the British Government did not know which side their bread was buttered on, they must learn by experience. An economic war would cost the United States something; it would be regrettable and silly and all that, but apparently it must come. “Nothing will bring the British to reason but physical obstruction applied to their bodily senses. We must show that we are capable of foregoing commerce with them before they will be capable of consenting to an equal commerce. We have all the world besides open to supply us with gewgaws, and all the world to buy our tobacco.” Mr. Jefferson put it even more explicitly to Colonel Smith that “of all nations on earth, the British require to be treated with the most hauteur. They require to be kicked into common good manners.” Even John Adams, who had some misgivings about Mr. Jefferson’s despondent estimate of the situation, finally came around to the same way of thinking. After the Embargo of 1807 and the War of 1812 had rubbed a sense of reality into his fine old head, he wrote Mr. Jefferson that “Britain will never be our friend until we are her master.”

VI

The European ensemble, and the progress of Constitution-building in America during the years 1786-1787, turned Mr. Jefferson’s mind towards some speculations on the general theory and practice of government. The trouble with government in Europe as he saw it, was its complete centralization in the hands of the relatively few non-producers; the symbol of this centralization was monarchy. Those who actually applied labour and capital to natural resources for the production of wealth, had no voice in government. Just before Mr. Jefferson set sail for Europe, he remarked to General Washington that “the hereditary branches of modern government are the patrons of privilege and prerogative, and not of the natural rights of the people, whose oppressors they generally are”; and one of his last letters from Paris, written to Edward Carrington, contained the observation that “the natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” Because this tendency is wholly natural, there was no point to getting up a great sweat of moral indignation against it. One of the most profound preferences in human nature is for satisfying one’s needs and desires with the least possible exertion; for appropriating wealth produced by the labour of others, rather than producing it by one’s own labour. Any Frenchman, for example, would rather worm his way into the membership of the Farmers-General and levy on the wealth produced by French labour and capital, than employ his own labour and capital to produce wealth for himself. Any Englishman would rather live by appropriating the economic rent of land-holdings than by working. Obviously, the stronger and more centralized the government, the safer would be the guarantee of such monopolies; in other words, the stronger the government, the weaker the producer, the less consideration need be given him and the more might be taken away from him. A deep instinct of human nature being for these reasons always in favour of strong government, nothing could be a more natural progress of things than “for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” In England and France, government had gained all the ground there was, and liberty had yielded all. That was the whole story.

For America, Mr. Jefferson was convinced that republicanism was a better system because it lent itself less easily to centralization. It gave the producer some kind of voice in the direction of affairs, and since the producer was greatly in the majority in any society, he had—if he were interested and intelligent enough to profit by it—a fair chance of keeping his interests uppermost. Republicanism was not the ideal system. The Indians, as Mr. Jefferson points out to Madison, lived in a distinct and quite highly organized type of society, and got on very well without any government at all. While “it is a problem not clear in my mind that [this] condition is not the best,” he believed it to be “inconsistent with any great degree of population,” though he seems never to have asked himself just why this should be so. Republicanism, “wherein the will of every one has a just influence,” was the best system attainable; the spirit of the times had not disclosed anything better. It “has a great deal of good in it. The mass of mankind under that enjoys a precious degree of liberty and happiness.”

But republicanism is no fetish; he is perfectly clear-sighted about this. Republicanism gives the producing classes their chance; but it does not protect them automatically if they are not for ever alive to their chance. “If once the people become inattentive to the public affairs,” he writes austerely from Paris to Edward Carrington, “you and I and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions.” The most that can be said for republicanism is that intrinsically “the republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind”; but most of the republics of the world, he yet reminds Madison, have degenerated into governments of force; and in his draft of the Diffusion of Knowledge Bill, eight years before, he had incorporated the warning that while “certain forms of government are better calculated than others to protect individuals in the free exercise of their natural rights, and are at the same time themselves better guarded against degeneracy, yet experience hath shown that even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”

He was aware, again, that America was far from free to work out, in isolation and on pure theory, a system of its own. Aside from, collisions of domestic interests, which were shortly to furnish him most disagreeable surprises, external circumstances counted heavily. If the United States were to exist at all, and not be swallowed piecemeal by the predacious military powers of Europe, it must become, for some purposes, a nation; it must have, for instance, a central body of authority for its foreign affairs. His efforts abroad in behalf of trade had taught him that the Articles of Confederation would not answer. As long as he could not make clear whether the legal regulation of trade was a Federal or a State function, he could get no trade. But he was sure that the purposes for which the United States should be a nation must be as few as possible, otherwise the history of European exploitation would be repeated on the grand scale. The utmost concession that it would be proper to make, as he wrote to his old preceptor, George Wythe, was that “the States should severally preserve their sovereignty in whatever concerns themselves alone, and whatever may concern another State, or any foreign nation, should be made a part of the Federal sovereignty.” After all, the domestic functions of an honest Federal sovereignty were few, and their character purely administrative and non-political—carrying the mails, coining money, regulating transportation, and the like—and for the rest, speaking generally, “the States should be left to do whatever acts they can do as well as the General Government.” In short, the United States should be a nation abroad, and a confederacy at home.

This arrangement, he thought, would be workable and satisfactory. The producer could not be exploited unless he were first driven off the land, and this he could not be but by a much greater strengthening of the central government. If this were attempted, he thought that the producer, being so vastly in the majority, might be counted on for effective resistance, thus keeping both State and Federal governments, as he called it, “virtuous.” Referring to the proposed Constitution, he therefore writes Madison in 1787 that on principle he is for the will of the majority, and that if a majority approve of the forthcoming Constitution, “I shall concur in it cheerfully, in hopes they will amend it whenever they find it works wrong. This reliance can not deceive us as long as we remain virtuous; and I think we shall be so as long as agriculture is our principal object, which will be the case while there remains vacant lands in any part of America. When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as in Europe.” His own private view went far beyond the idea of the State as the self-governing unit; he was for making the smallest political unit self-governing, in order to keep the producer alert and interested. He admitted to John Adams in 1813 that his Diffusion of Knowledge Bill had a joker in it for this ulterior purpose, by dividing the county into “wards” or towns, and “confiding to them the care of their poor, their roads, police, elections, the nomination of jurors . . . in short, to have made them little republics with a warden at the head of each, for all those concerns which, being under their eye, they would manage better than the larger republics of the county or State.” But it was better to concede something and get enough, than to insist on all and get nothing; and the establishment of the State as the domestic self-governing unit, he thought, would probably be enough to keep the producer’s head above water.

VII

As the French Revolution drew on, Mr. Jefferson was frankly pleased with the prospect. He saw in it the chance of emancipation, not only for the French producer, but for the producing interests everywhere in Europe. The successful reformation of government in France would insure “a general reformation through Europe, and the resurrection to a new life of their people, now ground to dust by the abuses of the governing powers.” Where his class-interest was concerned, he was always a staunch friend of the revolutionary principle, and he made no bones of saying so. Revolutions served a double purpose. They kept the Government’s ear open to its master’s voice, and they also sharpened popular attention to what the Government was doing. On this account he was not inclined to be over-particular about the merits of a revolutionary cause; the attitude traditionally ascribed to the southern Irish, of being more or less against the Government under any and all circumstances, was one that he thought, on the whole, rather salutary. When he got news of Shays’s Rebellion in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, late in 1786, he picked, out of all unlikely people in New England, the president of Yale College and the redoubtable and forthright Mrs. John Adams, as candidates for a good round piece of his mind. “I like a little rebellion now and then,” he wrote Mrs. Adams, “. . . The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all.” Yale College had just given Mr. Jefferson an honorary degree, and in acknowledging the compliment, the newly made Doctor of Laws took occasion to remark that the commotions in America “are a proof that the people have liberty enough, and I could not wish them less than they have. If the happiness of the mass of the people can be secured at the expense of a little tempest now and then, or even of a little blood, it will be a precious purchase. Malo libertatem periculosam quam quietem servitutem.”

Shays’s Rebellion, however, had more than an academic interest for him. “These people are not entirely without excuse,” he wrote Carmichael. Theirs seemed to him an uprising against an unfair pressure of debt and taxation, applied by collusion among a minority of exploiting interests—the rich merchant-enterprisers or “factors” of Boston, whom he almost begrudged the right to live; the judges and lawyers, whom he would not trust as far as he would a dog with his dinner; and the horde of speculators, bankers, “stock-jobbers and king-jobbers,” whom he regarded as mere vermin. He suspected that the agonized invocation of law and order that went up against Shays’s demonstration was organized by these interests, for the people were on the other side—so much so, it turned out, that although the ringleaders were condemned, they were never punished. He thought that the prompt turning of this incident to account as the basis of demand for a stronger and more stable central government represented what he later called “the interested clamours and sophistry of speculating, shaving and banking institutions.” The Federal Congress had not dared come to the assistance of Massachusetts in putting down the rebellion, but it did, later in the year, make provision for a Federal army, under plea of danger from the Indians; and in its secret journals it made the astonishing entry of its confidence in “the most liberal exertions of the money-holders in the State of Massachusetts and the other States in filling the loans authorized by the resolve of this date,” to pay the troops! While Washington was writing in bewilderment from Mount Vernon of his acute distress at “the disorders that have arisen in these States,” and of his fear that “there are combustibles in every State which a spark might set fire to”; while General Knox was announcing his discovery that Americans were “men possessing all the turbulent passions belonging to that animal, and that we must have a government proper and adequate for him”—Mr. Jefferson, in Paris, with a revolution of the first magnitude on the point of breaking about his ears, was scanning the latest accounts of Shays’s uprising, and writing earnestly to W. S. Smith, “God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people can not be all and always well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty.”

VIII

The leaders of the French Revolution in its first phase, being new at the business, were inclined to profit by Mr. Jefferson’s experience. “Being from a country which had successfully passed through a similar reformation, they were disposed to my acquaintance, and had some confidence in me.” The committee of the Assembly, appointed to draft a Constitution, asked him to meet with them and assist them. He declined to do this, but, chiefly through his old and good friend Lafayette, he managed to contribute some first-rate advice without getting himself into trouble; although on one occasion, friendship manoeuvred him into the appearance, at least, of a pretty serious diplomatic indiscretion, and if he had not had as sensible and sympathetic a person as the French Foreign Minister to deal with, he might have found his position invidious. Lafayette invited himself and half a dozen friends to dine at Mr. Jefferson’s house one evening, and when dinner was over, the company resolved itself into a spirited caucus, finally producing, after six hours’ discussion, the concordat upon which the Republicans and moderate Royalists in the Assembly subsequently united. It was the measure which “decided the fate of the Constitution.” Although Mr. Jefferson was but “a silent witness” to this notable performance, it was hardly the kind of thing to be going on in the residence of the American Minister. He accordingly lost no time in looking up Montmorin next morning, and making what amends he could for his apparent breach of etiquette, telling him “with truth and candour how it had happened that my house had been made the scene of conferences of such a character.” But Montmorin, who saw well enough which way the wind was blowing, had no prejudices; indeed, “he earnestly wished I would habitually assist at such conferences, being sure I should be useful in moderating the warmer spirits and promoting a wholesome and practicable reformation only.”

Montmorin’s trust was based on sound evidence of Mr. Jefferson’s attitude and disposition. He had his own sources of information about him, and knew him to be neither a doctrinaire revolutionist nor a doctrinaire Republican, but the spokesman of an out-and-out class-interest, with which Montmorin himself had a certain amount of cautious sympathy. Revolution was not an end in itself, but the means to an end; its end was the economic emancipation of the producing class, and the less trouble and disturbance about approaching this end, the less likelihood that the end would be obscured and the line of approach deflected. Mr. Jefferson saw the chance that usually shines out of such circumstances for one golden moment, and then, if unimproved, disappears for ever—the chance of what his great contemporary, the Duke of Wellington, called “a revolution by due course of law.” The Government was ready to yield, as it afterwards did yield, quite enough for the Revolution to go on with and consolidate its gains in peace—the King’s speech at the City Hall, his acceptance of a popular escort headed by the Bourgeois Guards under Lafayette, his assumption of the popular cockade, were “such an amende honorable as no sovereign ever made and no people ever received.” Perceiving at the outset that the Government was in a state of wholesome fear, particularly because of the lukewarmness of many of the younger aristocrats and disaffection in the army, Mr. Jefferson, “painfully anxious lest despotism, after an unaccepted offer to bind its own hands, should seize you again with tenfold fury,” earnestly besought the revolutionists to give play to the spirit of compromise. Everything gained in this way would be a clear gain, while everything gained by admitting the spirit of violence and passion must in the long run have the extravagances of violence and passion charged off against it. “I urged most strenuously an immediate compromise; to secure what the Government was now ready to yield, and trust to future occasions for what might still be wanting.” He drew up the terms of what he thought a proper compromise, and gave the draft to Lafayette and St. Etienne; but the revolutionary leaders rejected it as too moderate, and took no action, thus permitting the one opportunity for peaceful adjustment to slip away.

“Events have proved their lamentable error,” Mr. Jefferson wrote thirty years later, after the Revolution had degenerated through the course of its own enormities, and made way for those of Napoleon. The revolutionists could not foresee “the melancholy sequel of their well-meant perseverance; that their physical force would be usurped by a first tyrant to trample on the independence and even the existence of other nations.” Worst of all, they could not foresee the ensuing defensive freemasonry of the Russian Emperor Alexander’s league of nations called the Holy Alliance, set up to make international common cause among the exploiting classes and unite them against the revolutionary spirit, wherever found. They could not foresee that their error “would afford a fatal example for the atrocious conspiracy of kings against their people; would generate their unholy and homicide alliance to make common cause among themselves, and to crush by the power of the whole the efforts of any part to moderate their abuses and oppressions.”

Mr. Jefferson believed that the republican spirit also, like the revolutionary spirit, was going hand over head. Republicanism, he thought, in the words of an acute critic, tried to do too much and did it. He was uncompromisingly for republicanism in America, as affording the producer the best fulcrum or purchase for maintaining his political ascendancy. But France, unlike America which had no great transition to make and no binding force of political tradition to overcome, was not in shape to employ it, and would make a mess of it. Mr. Jefferson saw nothing more certain than that France would finally become republican, if let alone, and in none too long time for safety. “This whole chapter in the history of man is new”; if the American experiment succeeded, which one could hardly doubt, republicanism in France, as in all the world, would catch the contagion quickly enough. The, thing to be avoided meanwhile was the hazard of win-all, lose-all. “The King was now become a passive machine in the hands of the National Assembly, and had he been left to himself, he would have willingly acquiesced in whatever they should devise as best for the nation.” The wisest move would be to constitutionalize the monarchy, and leave Louis XVI at the head of it, “with powers so large as to enable him to do all the good of his station, and so limited as to restrain him from its abuse.” Remembering the great reforms projected by Turgot in the early years of the king’s reign, and ended only by the opposition of the nobles and clergy, whose claws were now effectively clipped, Mr. Jefferson believed that the King would faithfully administer a sound constitutional policy, and “more than this I do not believe he ever wished.” Something should certainly be done about the wretched, dissipated, slippery, half-witted little queen. “I have ever believed that had there been no queen, there would have been no Revolution”; but with all his wrath at her follies, Mr. Jefferson was not for bringing her under the law of treason. “I should have shut up the queen in a convent, putting harm out of her power, and placed the King in his station, investing him with limited powers which I verily believe he would have honestly exercised according to the measure of his understanding. In this way no void would have been created, courting the usurpation of a military adventurer, nor occasion given for those enormities which demoralized the nations of the world.” It was in the void that he saw danger.

Still, one could appreciate the popular point of view; one could even respect the spirit of the popular judgment. The nation had suffered horribly at the hands of these people, and the thought of vengeance was not unnatural. “Of those who judged the King, many thought him wilfully criminal.” Again, if the King lived and if the nation kept up an ever-thinning shade of monarchy, would there not be continual dynastic plottings and graspings after its lost substance? Again, if the nation kept the trappings of monarchy and at the same time made an end of the economic exploitation of which monarchy was the symbol, would it not live “in perpetual conflict with the horde of kings who would war against a generation which might come home to themselves”? Had not the Allied Powers indeed already put a counter-revolutionary army into France, under the Duke of Brunswick? Finally, might it not be well to have the new political formulas applied as widely as possible and tried out as quickly as possible, in behalf of clearing their theory?

Chance made Mr. Jefferson an eye-witness of the first bloodshed of the French Revolution. Just as a casual mob made ready to stone a handful of cavalry drawn up in the Place Louis Quinze, his carriage came by. They could hardly have known who he was, but he was a stranger and that was enough. This fracas was their own affair; it was nothing for a stranger to be mixed up in. There was a deep unconscious significance in the action of the mob, which, with stones in their uplifted hands, paused a moment to let the great libertarian pass through their midst in safety. “But the moment after I had passed, the people attacked the cavalry with stones. . . . This was the signal for universal insurrection. . . . ”