Chapter IV 1784-1789 (Continued) I

ALTHOUGH business on the whole was dull, the American representative finally got a few concessions on minor lines of trade, such as fish-oil, potash, ship-timber and hides. He could do little about tobacco. His efforts to loosen the tobacco-monopoly, indeed, were not wholly well thought of even at home. Robert Morris of Philadelphia had got an exclusive contract with the Farmers-General, which had had the disastrous effect of cutting down the American planter’s price by nearly fifty per cent, and had “thrown the commerce of that article in agonies”; and in December, 1786, Mr. Jefferson confides to Monroe a suspicion that “my proceedings to redress the abusive administration of tobacco by the Farmers-General have indisposed towards me a powerful person in Philadelphia who was profiting from that abuse.” He had not suggested an annulment of the contract, however, chiefly because if the contract were broken, the price of tobacco in the French market would break with it. He merely sought that “after the expiration of this contract, no similar one should be made, and that meanwhile the Farmers-General should be obliged to purchase annually about fifteen thousand hogsheads of American tobacco, imported directly from the United States in French or American vessels, at the same price or on the same conditions which have been stipulated by the contract with Mr. Morris.” This arrangement was effected—at least on paper—and it was probably the thing that first brought Mr. Jefferson in for the unfavourable attention of the alert and growing brood of American speculative interests outside his native State. With his customary dislike of explaining any course of conduct that he deemed proper to follow, he told Monroe that while he had not actually gone to the lengths that Morris might suspect from a certain paragraph which Calonne had written on the subject of the tobacco-contract, he had done what he conceived to be the right thing all round, “and I will not so far wound my privilege of doing that, without regard to any man’s interest, as to enter into any explanations of this paragraph with him. Yet I esteem him highly, and suppose that hitherto he had esteemed me.”

The King of Prussia, who hated England, alone was prompt and business-like towards the American commercial envoys. “Old Frederic of Prussia met us cordially and without hesitation, and, appointing the Baron de Thulemeyer, his Minister at the Hague, to negotiate with us, we communicated to him our projet which, with little alteration by the King, was soon concluded.” Denmark and Tuscany also nibbled at the bait. But “other Powers appearing indifferent, we did not think it proper to press them. They seemed in fact to know little about us but as rebels who had been successful in throwing off the yoke of the mother country.” In the general field of diplomacy, Mr. Jefferson found little to do. The Barbary States were at the time making such a success with piracy on the Mediterranean that they had brought it up to something like the dimensions of a national industry; and Mr. Jefferson had not been long at his post before a Moroccan cruiser captured and confiscated an American ship and held her crew for ransom. The maritime Powers of Europe were finding it cheaper to pay tribute than to fight, and were getting along comfortably on that basis; but under the Articles of Confederation the United States had little money for tribute or for fighting or for anything. Disliking the idea of tribute, Mr. Jefferson organized a provisional combination of the smaller maritime Powers with the United States to police the North African coast with a dozen men-of-war, having first made sure that the French Government would not interfere, or permit England to interfere, with this joint enterprise. Congress, however, could not see its way to supply the American quota of one frigate, so nothing was done.

His only other diplomatic concern of importance was in international finance; and his principal achievement in that line was to head off his impetuous colleague, John Adams, who had been elected Vice-President, from going off home, incontinently leaving the dead and malodorous albatross of American credit hung to his neck. Adams, while at the Hague, before his transfer to London, had a general authority to deal with the Dutch bankers as best he could, in pursuance of a hand-to-mouth national policy of borrowing oneself out of debt. “Interest on the public debt, and the maintenance of the diplomatic establishment in Europe, had been habitually provided in this way.” The ice was getting thin under this policy, however, and Adams, with his vigorous single-track mind full of the Vice-Presidency, was hastening his preparations homeward, telling the bankers that they should see Mr. Jefferson in case anything came up. “I was daily dunned by a company who had formerly made a small loan to the United States, the principal of which was now become due; and our bankers in Amsterdam had notified me that the interest on our general debt would be expected in June; that if we failed to pay it, it would be deemed an act of bankruptcy, and would effectually destroy the credit of the United States and all future prospect of obtaining money there.” This was serious. “I had no powers, no instructions, no means and no familiarity with the subject,” he wrote, pathetically. “It had always been exclusively under his [Adams’s] management.” Fortunately, Adams’s preoccupied brain had somehow made room for the idea that before sailing he ought to take time for a farewell visit of courtesy at the Dutch court, to which he had been formerly accredited; and by a fortunate coincidence, Mrs. Adams communicated the tidings of his departure in a pour prendre congé which Mr. Jefferson “received on the very day on which he [Adams] would arrive at the Hague.” Mr. Jefferson accordingly set out at once by the shortest way, through Brussels, Antwerp and Rotterdam. There was no time to lose; “a consultation with him, and some provision for the future, was indispensable while we could yet avail ourselves of his powers; for when they would be gone, we should be without resource.” He paused long enough at the Hague to pull John Adams’s head down from the clouds and stow him aboard his carriage for Amsterdam, where by some marvel of persuasion they managed to peg the nondescript young republic’s finances for another period.

Aside from these matters, and from writing official reports on the state of European politics, his duties were of a minor and routine character. The impecunious American turned up pretty regularly in his day’s work. “Gave Alex^r Learmouth, a poor American, 36 f,” “Gave Hicks, an American, 12 f”—such entries occur in his account-books about as often as one would expect. Then there were the private creditors of the United States, largely French officers who had served in the American war and who had not been paid—the United States not having been in shape at the time to pay even its own soldiers in anything better than paper. These creditors were a great pest, the worst of it being that their claims were valid, that almost without exception they needed the money, and that the poor American representative was utterly unable to give them anything more substantial than sympathy. Then there were the American sailors whom the Farmers-General caught in a prohibited port with a cargo of tobacco, and promptly jailed. They said they had been driven into port by a storm; the Farmers-General said they were smugglers; perhaps both were right. Mr. Jefferson did what he could to soften the rigours of a French prison, and worked long and hard for their release. Then there were the travellers—and then there were the young, the ingenuous, the sentimental travellers! He did his best by them in unfailing equanimity, like that other “dainty and high-bred Stoic,” as Walter Pater calls Marcus Aurelius, “who still thought manners a true part of morals, according to the old sense of the term, and who regrets now and then that he can not control his thoughts equally well with his countenance.” Gouverneur Morris, whom Robert Morris had sent over to Paris to keep an eye on the tobacco contract with the Farmers-General, left this significant observation in his diary:

May 30th—Call on Mr. Jefferson and sit a good while. General conversation on character and politics. I think he does not form very just estimates of character, but rather assigns too many to the humble rank of fools, whereas in life the gradations are infinite and each individual has his peculiarities of fort and feeble.

Then there was Ledyard. John Ledyard, of Connecticut, had been with Captain Cook on the Pacific, had given an excellent account of himself, and had published details of the voyage, putting Cook’s treatment of the natives in an unfavourable light; thereby, Mr. Jefferson said, “lessening our regrets at his fate.” When Mr. Jefferson reached Paris, Ledyard was there, trying to form a company to engage in the fur trade on the Pacific coast. This was not wholly a rattle brained idea, for the French were then inclined to look with interest in that direction, and the expedition of la Pérouse, in 1785, was thought to have among its objects the examination of the northern American coast-region with a view to establishing trading posts. Like Patrick Henry, Ledyard seems to have exercised a curious fascination upon Mr. Jefferson, by virtue of his great natural powers; and besides, Mr. Jefferson had been for years interested in geographical exploration, especially of the trans-Mississippi regions of American. Seeing Ledyard then “out of business and of a roaming, restless character, I suggested the enterprise of exploring the western part of our continent by passing through St. Petersburg to Kamchatka, and procuring a passage thence in some of the Russian vessels to Nootka Sound, whence he might make his way across the continent.” Mr. Jefferson undertook to interest Catherine II in this extraordinary project, to the extent at least of permitting Ledyard to pass through her domains unmolested. He seems to have counted too much on the complaisance of Catherine’s representatives in Paris, for there is record of his having given Ledyard “600 f. on account Empress of Russia.” Catherine, however, put the enterprise down at once as sheer insanity, and refused to have anything to do with it or to allow Ledyard within her frontiers. To her way of thinking, apparently, Russia had lunatics enough of her own, without importing any. Nevertheless Ledyard started, and “pursued his course to within two hundred miles of Kamchatka, where he was overtaken by an arrest from the Empress, brought back to Poland and there dismissed.” Poor Ledyard was a man of humour as well as pertinacity. In 1787, Mr. Jefferson writes, “I had a letter from Ledyard lately, dated at St. Petersburg. He had but two shirts, and yet more shirts than shillings. Still, he was determined to obtain the palm of the first circumambulator of the earth. He says that having no money, they kick him from place to place, and thus he expects to be kicked around the globe.”

Mr. Jefferson got one more glimpse of this strange being who, as he wrote dryly to Charles Thomson, had “too much imagination.” Ledyard somehow found his way from Poland to London, where he “engaged under the auspices of a private society formed there for pushing discoveries into Africa.” On his way to embark at Marseilles, he stopped at Paris, where he promised Mr. Jefferson that if he returned from his explorations of the Nile and the Niger, he would go to Kentucky and penetrate to the western side of the continent. But he never returned. There is possibly just the faintest suggestion of emotion discernible in Mr. Jefferson’s few words to Carmichael in 1789, “My last accounts of Ledyard were from Grand Cairo. He was just then plunging into the unknown regions of Africa, probably never to emerge again.”

II

But the true business of life in Europe, as in America, lay outside the routine of politics and diplomacy. One of the first matters that came under Mr. Jefferson’s notice in Paris was the theory of Buffon that hot countries produce large animals and moist countries small ones; and the variant of the same theory, fathered by the Abbé Raynal, that the transplanting of Europeans to America tends to degeneration of physique. He collided sharply with Buffon on both these assumptions, denying that the atmosphere of America was more humid than that of Europe, and maintaining that neither heat nor humidity had anything to do with determining the size of animals. He got data on the minor point from Franklin, proving that there was more moisture in the air of Paris and London than in the air of Philadelphia. This did not amount to much, to be sure, but it was all that could be shown on the basis of observation and experiment until more facts were collected. “In the meantime,” he says, “doubt is wisdom.”

Even admitting the “superior humidity of America,” however, he contended that Buffon’s theory still ran aground on the mammoth, for instance; and, among living animals, on the cat tribe, on birds, on certain types of deer, and on the elk and moose—on nearly everything, in fact. Buffon had his doubts; he was polite about them, but imperturbable. A mammoth was probably the same thing as an elephant. As for the others, one must see them in order to make up one’s mind. The moose seemed interesting, as Mr. Jefferson described it, but it was no doubt the same thing as a reindeer. Mr. Jefferson was an American, and these well-meaning children of the forest were imperfectly informed and likely to exaggerate. There must be some mistake about it; the moose could hardly be a distinct species. As for the elk, Buffon would like to see its horns; “this would decide whether it be an elk or a deer.”

Buffon was the greatest of men in his line, and worth converting; not for the sake of a mere theory, still less of deciding the petty personal question of who was right and who was wrong, but for the sake of attracting the eye of science everywhere to the unsuspected resources of the new country. “He did not know our panther. I gave him the stripped skin of one I bought in Philadelphia, and it presents him a new species. . . . I have convinced him that our deer is not a chevreuil.” This was something, but the whole matter might as well be settled first as last. Mr. Jefferson accordingly asked John Sullivan, President of New Hampshire, to send over the horns, bones and skin of a moose, particularly, and those of such other animals on the list as could be conveniently got hold of. In his eagerness, he forgot to suggest a limit of expense in the matter, and the bill of sixty guineas was a heavy blow. The mystified Sullivan had taken him at his word and made a good workmanlike job of it. “He had made the acquisition the object of a regular campaign, and that too of a winter one. The troops he employed sallied forth, as he writes me, in the month of March—much snow—a herd attacked—one killed—in the wilderness—a road to be cut twenty miles—to be drawn by hand from the frontiers to his house—bones to be cleaned, etc., etc., etc.” Mr. Jefferson paid the costs of this expedition without flinching, when he found out how they had been incurred, and shortly had the satisfaction of presenting Buffon with “the bones and skin of a moose, the horns of another individual of the same species, the horns of the caribou, the elk, the deer, the spiked-horned buck, and the roebuck of America.” Buffon was graceful, as became a man of science, and wound up the controversy by saying, “I should have consulted you before publishing my natural history, and then I should have been sure of the facts.”

An unauthorized French edition of Mr. Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia, the book which gave rise to this little brush with Buffon, was just now putting its author in something of a quandary. The volume had been originally compiled off-hand for the information of the French representative in the United States. In two respects it remains a literary curiosity of the first magnitude; in the range of observation, information and memory that it exhibits, and in the extraordinary interest that it carries for the general reader, without showing any mark whatever of literary effort. It is a book of statistics, without pretence of being anything else, and it is probably the most interesting statistical work ever produced—interesting, that is, to a reader who has no antecedent interest in the statistics it presents. Mr. Jefferson did not publish the book in America, chiefly from diffidence; besides, it contained observations on slavery and on the State Constitution, that he feared might “produce an irritation” which would stand in the way of reform. When he went to France, he had a few copies privately printed for the benefit of acquaintances whom he could trust; and one of these copies getting into the hands of a French publisher, it was surreptitiously translated and put on the press. Mr. Jefferson was quite as willing to have the book appear in Europe as he was unwilling to have it appear in America; it was not bad advertising for the United States. But the translation was a botch. Mr. Jefferson succeeded in delaying publication while he struggled with some of its worst errors, when the Abbé Morellet came forward, to his great relief, with an offer to retranslate the work de novo. By way of providing a frontispiece to the book, Mr. Jefferson mustered his talents as a surveyor and mathematician, and produced a map, on the scale of one inch to twenty miles, which he caused to be engraved in London. “It comprehends from Albemarle Sound to Lake Erie, and from Philadelphia to the mouth of the Great Kanawha, containing Virginia and Pennsylvania, a great part of Maryland, and a part of North Carolina.” He enlisted Dr. Bancroft, in London, to arrange for the engraving and printing; and he added a postscript stipulating that his name should not appear on the map, partly out of regard to the original authors whom he had consulted in its compilation, but chiefly and characteristically, “because I do not wish to place myself at the bar of the public.”

His letters in the early summer of 1785 describe at great length the ill-fated experiment in aerial navigation made by Pilâtre de Roziére, who lost his life in attempting to cross the English Channel in a balloon; and also a curious anticipation of the screw-propeller, which worked in the air instead of in the water. “I went to see it. . . . The screw, I think, would be more effectual if placed below the surface of the water.” He sends the president of Yale College the star-catalogues of de la Caille and Flamsteed, and discusses briefly the identity of the planet Jupiter with the 964th star of Mayer. He comments on Pigott’s discovery of periodical variations of light in the star Algol. “What are we to conclude from this? That there are suns which have their orbits of revolution too? But this would suppose a wonderful harmony in their planets, and present a new scene, where the attracting powers should be without and not within the orbit. The motion of our sun would be a miniature of this.” He notes the superior availability of “the metal called platina; to be found only in South America,” for the specula of telescopes, since “it is insusceptible of rust, as gold and silver are, none of the acids affecting it excepting the aqua regia.” Noticing that the royal cabinet of natural history was without specimens of the American grouse and pheasant, he asks Hopkinson to stuff and send over a pair of each, and to send also two or three hundred pecannuts, of which he always thought uncommonly well, for some reason or other, and believed that the French would take great interest in cultivating—a belief which turned out to be illusory. In behalf of literature, he would be all for the expulsion of the Turks from Greece, “if they meant to leave the country in possession of the Greek inhabitants. We might then expect once more to see the language of Homer and Demosthenes a living language. . . . But this is not intended. They only propose to put the Greeks under other masters; to substitute one set of barbarians for another.”

Whenever he heard of a new mechanical process or device, he promptly went to see it, and if it had value, he put his mind on it until he got it to work as he wished. Thus he patiently tinkered with the model of an English stationary copying-press, until he succeeded in making one that was portable; and then in great delight he sent them to one after another of his friends in America. When the Argand lamp came out, he was immediately on hand to test it and ship it over. Hearing of a mechanic who had standardized the parts of muskets, “I went to the workman. He presented me the parts of fifty locks taken to pieces and arranged in compartments. I put several together myself, taking pieces at hazard as they came to hand, and they fitted in the most perfect manner.” A few days afterwards, he went “to see a plough which was to be worked by a windlass, without horses or oxen. It was a poor affair. With a very troublesome apparatus, applicable only to a dead level, four men could do the work of two horses.” He comments on the new acid process of copperplate engraving, as an art which will be “amusing to individuals,” evidently with no great notion of its importance. He considers attentively the new steampumps of Paris, finding them nothing more in point of principle than “the fire-engine you have seen described in the books of hydraulics”; and the steam grist-mill at London, which by his calculation “makes a peck and a half of coal perform exactly as much as a horse in one day can perform.” This is much worth while, because “America has abundance of fuel.” On its first trial flight from its nest in the inventor’s brain, he caught Drost’s method of minting coins, which works “so as to strike both faces and the edge at one stroke, and makes a coin as beautiful as a medal.” Here was a real find. As yet, Drost had made only a few coins by way of sample, “to show the perfection of his manner. I am endeavouring to procure one to send to Congress as a model for their coinage.” He examined Renaudin’s metronome, and writes Hopkinson that a little Yankee ingenuity can make one plenty good enough for anybody, out of a plumb-bob and a piece of string. The colloquy with Buffon on the relative humidity of the American climate led him to inquire in London for a hygrometer made on the principles laid down by Franklin; and he presently began keeping daily hygrometric observations in addition to the thermometric and barometric records which he always kept. He complains to M. de Crèvecœur that the newspapers are “robbing us of another of our inventions to give it to the English, . . . that is, the making the circumference of a wheel of one single piece. The farmers in New Jersey were the first who practiced it, and they practiced it commonly.” He then tells how the London patentee got the idea originally from Franklin, who laboured with him for some weeks in showing him how to make his first pair of wheels. “The writer in the paper supposes the English workman got his idea from Homer. But it is more likely the Jersey farmer got his idea from thence, because ours are the only farmers who can read Homer.” Besides, he adds, the Jersey practice is precisely that stated by Homer, while the English practice is quite different:

Homer’s words are (comparing a young hero killed by Ajax to a poplar felled by a workman) literally thus, ‘He fell on the ground like a poplar which has grown smooth in the west part of a great meadow, with its branches shooting from its summit. But the chariot-maker with the sharp axe has felled it, that he may bend a wheel for a beautiful chariot. It lies drying on the banks of the river.’ Observe the circumstances which coincide with the Jersey practice. 1. It is a tree growing in a moist place, full of juices and easily bent. 2. It is cut while green. 3. It is bent into the circumference of a wheel. 4. It is left to dry in that form. You who write French well and readily should write a line for the Journal, to reclaim the honour of our farmers.

After vindicating the New Jersey wheelwright’s competence in classical literature, he takes note of a new departure in wagon-making, whereby the axletree turns with the wheel, “thought to be proved best by experiment, though theory has nothing to urge in its favour.” He is hospitably disposed towards a forthcoming life-preserver or “hydrostatic waistcoat,” which a person puts on either over or under his clothes in one minute, and can inflate “by blowing with the mouth, in twelve seconds.” He sends George Wythe the best editions of Polybius and Vitruvius, acknowledging “my debt to you for whatever I am myself.” He makes drawings of a cabriolet and a phaeton for the Baron de Geismer, “made with such scrupulous exactness in every part that your workman may safely rely on them.” With them also “I enclose you a pretty little popular tune which will amuse you for a day or so.” The watches one could buy in Paris were something really beyond belief. Madison ought to have one: “I can get for you here one made as perfect as human art can make it, for about twenty-four louis.” This should be a great inducement to the careful little man; but who could stand out against the insinuating intimation that “for twelve louis more you can have in the same cover, but on the back and absolutely unconnected with the movements of the watch, a pedometer, which shall render you an exact account of the distances you walk”? Mr. Jefferson was charmed with the pedometer, although from the whole pageful of intricate directions that he subsequently sends to Madison, when the Father of the Constitution finally capitulated, it must have been a frightful nuisance. Madison was not the only one who felt the tempter’s power. “Are you become a great walker?” Mr. Jefferson suddenly drops in as a guileless obiter dictum in a letter to Bannister, “You know I preach up that kind of exercise. Shall I send you a conte-pas? It will cost you a dozen louis, but be a great stimulus to walking, as it will record your steps.”

Later on, when the east wind of the Revolution was beginning to blow upon spiritual activity in France, Mr. Jefferson speaks despondently of “the crumbs of science on which we are subsisting here.” He doubts the theory of promoting vegetable growth by electricity or by light, until it is better confirmed by observation. “It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.” He notes a new process of engraving on glass, and the experiments of chemists engaged in “the dispute about the conversion and reconversion of water and air.” Concerning the latter, again, he thinks it “laudable to encourage investigation, but to hold back conclusion.” Buffon frankly disparaged “the present ardour of chemical inquiry,” much to Mr. Jefferson’s surprise. “He affected to consider chemistry but as cookery, and to place the toils of the laboratory on a footing with those of the kitchen. I think it, on the contrary, among the most useful of sciences, and big with future discoveries for the utility and safety of the human race.” Nevertheless he thought it “probably an age too soon to propose the establishment of a system,” and that the attempt of Lavoisier in this direction was premature. “One single experiment may destroy the whole filiation of his terms, and his string of sulphates, sulphites and sulphures may have served no other end than to have retarded the progress of the science by a jargon, from the confusion of which, time will be requisite to extricate us.” His uneasy sense of the inhibiting power of words, and of the tendency by which words come to do duty for ideas, caused him invariably to nibble with long teeth at such attempts. “Upon the whole, I think the new nomenclature will be rejected, after doing more harm than good.” Experimental chemistry, however, was producing results; a first-rate improvement in the bleaching process was already established in France, and “I believe they are beginning to try it in England.” There was news also of a most important improvement in the composition of gunpowder, the details of which were not yet made public. Something was stirring, too, in the way of manufacturing artificial pearls, enough to be worth one-third of a long letter to Francis Hopkinson, who was making some experiments of the kind himself.

The trouble is that until the whole field of chance is canvassed, one can never tell when some awkward fact will get in the way of the finest generalization, and wreck it. In fact, it is best to keep generalization down to the minimum. “It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing than to believe what is wrong.” Here in Paris, for instance, is a little abbé, a humble son of the church, who has “shaken, if not destroyed, the theory of de Dominis, Descartes and Newton, for explaining the phenomenon of the rainbow.” If his observations were correct—and though they were borne out in part by Mr. Jefferson’s own observations, one must be duly cautious—“it appears to me that these facts demolish the Newtonian hypothesis, but they do not support that erected in its stead by the abbé. . . . The result is that we are wiser than we were, by having an error the less in our catalogue; but the blank occasioned by it must remain for some happier hypothesist to fill up.”

Indeed, it seems that “a patient pursuit of facts and cautious combination and comparison of them is the drudgery to which man is subjected by his Maker, if he wishes to attain sure knowledge.” Such drudgery can hardly be overdone; it is all worth while. Sullivan’s expedition in the wintry wilds of Massachusetts and New Hampshire was worth while, and so were the sixty guineas. Here in Paris again, for instance, there comes word from America of a brilliant conjecture that the Creek Indians are descendants of the Carthaginians who had in some way become separated from the main fleet of Hanno, and drifted to a new shore. Very well; one may “see nothing impossible in his conjecture,” but the way to find out is to find out. “I am glad he means to appeal to similarity of language, which I consider as the strongest kind of proof it is possible to adduce. I have somewhere read that the language of the ancient Carthaginians is still spoken by their descendants inhabiting the mountainous interior parts of Barbary, to which they were obliged to retire by the conquering Arabs. If so, a vocabulary of their tongue can still be got, and if your friend will get one of the Creek languages, a comparison will decide. He probably may have made progress in this business; but if he wishes any inquiries to be made on this side the Atlantic, I offer him my services cheerfully.”

Yet a chaste Platonic love of theory, unsoiled by “the rage of drawing general conclusions from partial and equivocal observations,” and indulged with those by whom one may not be misunderstood, is not inadmissable. Mr. Jefferson had mentioned to the Marquis de Chastellux that “the sea breezes which prevail in the lower parts of Virginia during the summer months, and in the warm parts of day, had made a sensible progress into the interior country; that formerly, within the memory of persons living, they extended but little above Williamsburg; that afterwards they became sensible as high as Richmond; and that at present they penetrate sometimes as far as the first mountains, which are above a hundred miles further from the sea coast than Williamsburg is.” The Marquis published this fact in a book; it came under the notice of the Academy of Science; and M. le Roy, member of the Academy, wrote Mr. Jefferson a “polite and learned letter,” asking his views on the cause of this phenomenon.

PAGE OF ACCOUNT BOOK

Entries of the upper half of the page are in Jefferson’s normal writing. Those of the lower half were made with his left hand after the fracture of his right wrist. (From Randall’s Life of Jefferson.)

Mr. Jefferson, writing with his left hand, his right wrist having been lately fractured by a fall, composed a letter of nine pages octavo, setting forth in full detail the theory of climatic changes induced by deforestation:

The first settlements of Virginia were made along the sea coast, bearing from the south towards the north, a little east-wardly. These settlements formed a zone in which, though every point was not cleared of its forest, yet a good proportion was cleared and cultivated. The cultivated earth, as the sun advances above the horizon in the morning, acquires from it an intense heat which is retained and increased through the warm parts of the day. The air resting on it becomes warm in proportion, and rises. On one side is a country still covered with forest, on the other is the ocean. The colder air from both of these then rushes towards the heated zone to supply the place left vacant there by the ascent of the warm air. The breeze from the West is light and feeble, because it traverses a country covered with mountains and forests, which retard its current. That from the east is strong, as passing over the ocean, wherein there is no obstacle to its motion. It is probable therefore that this easterly breeze forces itself far into, or perhaps beyond, the zone which produces it. This zone is, by the increase of population, continually widening into the interior country. The line of equilibrium between the easterly and westerly breezes is therefore progressive.

But according to the lie of the land, these prevailing breezes ought to be southeasterly; whereas in fact they blow pretty directly from the east, and sometimes from the northeast. How is this? “We know too little of the operations of nature in the physical world to assign causes with any degree of confidence.” Yet making the best guess one can, one would say it is probably due to lateral pressure of the strong east wind of the tropics, plus the influence of the sun, which is more freely exercised outside the equatorial belt “in proportion as the surface of the globe is there more obliquely presented to its rays.” Moreover, the northern air which flows down towards the equatorial parts “to supply the vacuum made there by the ascent of their heated air, has only the small rotatory motion of the polar latitudes from which it comes. Nor does it suddenly acquire the swifter rotation of the parts into which it enters. This gives it the effect of a motion opposed to that of the earth, that is to say, of an easterly one.” As a matter of free conjecture, “willing always, however, to guess at what we do not know,” one might perhaps assume that all these causes taken together would account for the direction of the sea breezes on the Virginian coast.

When running on in the vein of pure conjecture, too, one’s interest is always heightened if one can give one’s scientific imagination a practical turn. Speaking of the strong tropical east winds, he goes on to observe to M. le Roy that “they are known to occasion a strong current in the ocean in the same direction.” This current breaks on the wedge of land of which St. Roque is the point, the southern column of it probably turning off down the coast of Brazil. “I say probably, because I have never heard of the fact, and conjecture it from reason only.” The northern column is probably the agency that scooped out the Gulf of Mexico, cutting the continent nearly in two. It reissues from the northern part of the Gulf, washes the whole coast of the United States with a warm current, and then turns off eastwardly to the Banks of Newfoundland. It goes by the name of the Gulf Stream.

Since the Gulf Stream, then, has already so nearly bitten its way through the continent, why not hurry up its work for civilization? The Spaniards were desirous of trading with the Philippine Islands by way of the Cape of Good Hope. The Dutch were opposing them under authority of the Treaty of Munster, thus forcing them to consider a trade-route through the Straits of Magellan or around Cape Horn. Very well; then let the Spaniards cut a canal through the Isthmus of Panama! This would be “a work much less difficult than some even of the inferior canals of France,” and almost any kind of cut would answer, because the current of the Gulf Stream would do the rest. “The tropical current, entering it with all its force, would soon widen it sufficiently for its own passage, and thus complete in a short time that work which otherwise will still employ it for ages.” Great consequences would ensue. First, ships would have with them a steady wind and tide straight from Europe to Asia. Second, the Gulf of Mexico, “now the most dangerous navigation in the world, on account of its currents and movable sands, would become stagnant and safe.” Then, too, the Gulf Stream on the coast of the United States would cease, and the “derangements of course and reckoning” which its motion brings upon mariners, would cease also. Moreover, the fogs on the Banks of Newfoundland, which Franklin’s ingenious conjecture had ascribed to “the vapours of the Gulf Stream, rendered turbid by cold air,” would no longer plague the seafarer. Finally, when the Banks were no longer continually supplied with sand, weeds and warm water, “it might become problematical what effect changes of pasture and temperature would have on the fisheries.” As far as America was concerned, this last point was something for the New Englanders to worry about. Let John Adams scratch his head over it. In view of any larger good, the great agricultural republic at large need not consider these possibilities too carefully.

Speculation on the Panama Canal project and its consequences had often put a restless brain to sleep in the solitude of the Virginia hills, after an evening spent over some new geographical report or treatise. Other heads had been entertaining similar ideas. About a year and a half after broaching this theory to M. le Roy, Mr. Jefferson informs Carmichael of the assurance he had received from the Chevalier de Burgoyne, that a survey had been made of the Isthmus of Panama, “that a canal appeared very practicable, and that the idea was suppressed for political reasons altogether.” De Burgoyne, had seen the official report and given it a careful examination. Carmichael, as diplomatic and commercial representative of the United States at Madrid, might some time possibly be in a way to get track of it or even perhaps get a glimpse of it; so Mr. Jefferson casually drops a flea in his ear by saying that “this report is to me a vast desideratum, for reasons political and philosophical.” At this time, the United States was bounded on the west and south by an unbroken line of Spanish territory, and on the north by British territory. All the maritime American trade of the Mississippi Valley had to pass through the Spanish port of New Orleans. Some day, probably, these frontiers would be rectified, by one means or another, to the advantage of the United States. For the moment, however—indeed, for a good while to come—Spain would be a much more desirable neighbour than either of the two great predatory European Powers which were just then running up into the early preliminaries of a mighty duel. The thing was, to keep Spain’s foot where it stood; at all costs to keep the border territory from falling into the hands of France which, for all its innumerable private excellences, was “a den of robbers”; and on the other hand, to prevent any extension of territory on the part of the English, “a nation of buccaneers, urged by sordid avarice, and embarked in the flagitious enterprise of seizing to itself the maritime resources and rights of all other nations.” Spain must be regarded hopefully; Spain must be kept on the blind side of American foreign policy. Therefore, with respect to the Isthmus of Panama, Mr. Jefferson tells Carmichael that he “can not help suspecting the Spanish squadron to be gone to South America, and that some disturbances have been excited there by the British. The court of Madrid may suppose we would not see this with an unwilling eye. This may be true as to the uninformed part of our people; but those who look into futurity further than the present moment or age, and who combine well what is with what is to be, must see that our interests, well understood, and our wishes, are that Spain shall (not forever, but) very long retain her possessions in that quarter; and that her views and ours must, in a good degree and for a long time, concur.”

III

Mr. Jefferson’s fiddle-playing came to a sudden end on the afternoon of the fourth of September, 1786. Returning from a long walk in company with an acquaintance, he fell when about four miles from home, and broke his right wrist. He did not permit the accident to interrupt the conversation, nor did he mention it at the moment to his companion, but grasping the broken wrist, he held it tight behind his back until he reached his house, where finally informing his acquaintance of what had happened, he made his excuses and sent for a surgeon. In the intervening hour, the wrist had swollen; the fracture was improperly set, and the wrist remained always weak, painful and almost useless. This was the last of the violin—there was no help for that—but while one had one’s left hand, one could still write fairly well with a little practice, and the sooner one got into practice, the better. Accordingly, on the same afternoon, he made the regular entries in his account-book quite legibly; and in time he became ambidextrous with the pen, the weakness of the right hand somewhat offsetting the awkwardness of the left. The consciousness of being forever debarred from the execution of music did not apparently disincline him to music made by others, for according to his account-book, he went alone to a concert on the eighth of September, four days after his misadventure, and on the ninth he went alone to the opera.

Presently he got in another surgeon for consultation with the first, and there are indications of others concerned with his case in an advisory capacity. After four months had gone by, this array of talent, seeming not to know what else to propose, recommended Mr. Jefferson to bathe his disabled wrist in mineral water. They suggested several resorts, and out of the lot Mr. Jefferson, who had little confidence in the proposal, with characteristic forethought chose Aix; because if the treatment were ineffectual, he would not have spent his time in vain. While in the neighbourhood, he would be able to examine the canal of Languedoc, “acquiring knowledge of that species of navigation, which may be useful hereafter.” The interest in canal projects in the United States was then gathering strength to become in a few years a sheer rage. In particular, there was the great Potomac Canal project, headed by George Washington, which, as a purely speculative enterprise, had so much to do with the establishment of the national capital in a most ineligible place. Mr. Jefferson had no financial interest in this, or indeed in any speculative undertaking, never even acquiring a foot of land for speculative purposes in the whole course of his life. His personal distaste for money made in these ways, however, did not blind him to the “great view” presented by a project which “was to unite the commerce of the whole western country, almost, with the eastern.” Similar projects were being talked up in New York—Mr. Jefferson still had a year to live after the completion of the Erie Canal—in Pennsylvania, in South Carolina, here, there and everywhere. Decidedly one should know something about canals, and where could one learn better than in France? Besides, one could “make the tour of the ports concerned in commerce with us, to examine on the spot the defects of the late regulations respecting our commerce, to learn the further improvements that can be made in it.” Two or three months would be none too long for all this, “unless anything happens to recall me here sooner.”

But an object of far more interest than canals, seaports and the incidence of commercial regulations, was the economic and social condition of the producing class. “You must ferret the people out of their hovels, as I have done,” he wrote Lafayette, urging him to make a similar voyage of discovery, “look into their kettles, eat their bread, loll on their beds under pretence of resting yourself, but in fact to find if they are soft. You will feel a sublime pleasure in the course of this investigation, and a sublimer one hereafter, when you shall be able to apply your knowledge to the softening of their beds or the throwing a morsel of meat into their kettle of vegetables.” Here one was once more on the ground of reality. The show of civilization, as one saw it in Paris, was all very fine, but it was secondary and dependent. Here, on the contrary, the appeal to the æsthetic sense is authoritative; one yields to it with all one’s heart. “From the first olive fields of Pierrelatte to the orangeries of Hieres, has been continued rapture to me,” he tells Lafayette, “I am never satiated with rambling through the fields and farms, examining the culture and cultivators with a degree of curiosity which makes some take me to be a fool, and others to be much wiser than I am.”

He travelled alone, from the instinctive preference which kept him alone in most of his undertakings, and alone in spirit when he had company about him. “I think one travels more usefully when alone, because he reflects more.” He had no respect for the tourist’s or journalist’s notion of travel, regarding it as a mere licentious itch for covering ground. “To pass once along a public road through a country, and in one direction only,” he remarks to Professor Ebeling, “to put up at its tavern and get into conversation with the idle, drunken individuals who pass their time lounging in these taverns, is not the way to know a country, its inhabitants or manners.” The daily record of his travels is an elaboration of the farm and garden journals that he kept in Virginia; it is written laboriously, now with the right hand and again with the left, at the end of each day’s gleaning of information reported in a foreign tongue, chiefly in “a patois very difficult to understand.” For example, he observes that as one approaches the Rhone, in the direction of Aries, “the soil becomes a dark grey loam with some sand, and very good. The culture is corn, clover, St. Foin, olives, vines, mulberries, willow and some almonds. There is no forest. The hills are enclosed in dry stone wall. Many sheep.

At Nismes the earth is full of limestone. The horses are shorn. They are (March 22) pruning the olive. A very good tree produces sixty pounds of olives, which yield fifty pounds of oil; the best quality sells at twelve sous the pound retail, and ten sous wholesale. . . . The horse chestnut and mulberry are leafing; apple trees and peas blossoming. The first butterfly I have seen. . . . The arches of the Pont St. Esprit are of eighty-eight feet. Wild figs, very flourishing, grow out of the joints of the Pont du Gard. The fountain of Nismes is so deep that a stone was thirteen seconds descending from the surface to the bottom.

At the outset of his journey, near Sens, he was puzzled to see that instead of living in scattered farmhouses, after the Virginia fashion, the people tended to cluster together in villages. “Are they thus collected by that dogma of their religion which makes them believe that to keep the Creator in good humour with his own works, they must mumble a mass every day?” He seems not to have inquired into the matter, but to have referred it arbitrarily to his general principle that the farther one keeps from one’s neighbours, the better. “Certain it is that they are less happy and less virtuous in villages than they would be insulated with their families on the grounds they cultivate.” He hears great things of the climate in certain quarters. At one place there had been a notable cold spell fifteen years before, when “from being fine weather, in one hour there was ice hard enough to bear a horse. It killed people on the road.” Yet he is told, and apparently believes, that after all this, “the old roots of the olive trees put out again.” Elsewhere he was informed that “about five years ago there was such a hail as to kill cats.” After a winter in Paris, it seems, Mr. Jefferson’s ears were open to almost any tall story of the weather. Rather oddly for one of his great strength and stature, he was always painfully sensitive to cold. He wrote to William Dunbar in 1801, no doubt with vivid memories of the climate of Paris, especially in the notable winter of 1788, which nearly finished him, that “when I recollect, on the one hand, all the sufferings I have had from cold, and on the other, all my other pains, the former predominate greatly”; and it is often a matter of wonderment to him “that any human being should remain in a cold country who could find room in a warm one.” Still, although he could believe a great deal about the peculiarities of the French climate, the published reports of one hailstorm, even when supported by aristocratic authority, were almost too much for him. “I considered the newspaper account of hailstones of ten pounds weight, as exaggerations. But in a conversation with the Duke de la Rochefoucault the other day, he assured me that though he could not say he had seen such himself, yet he considered the fact as perfectly established.”

The permanent interest of this journal is probably in its testimony to the amount of actual labour that a human being is capable of packing into a period of three months. One reads with great respect, for example, the record of two days’ work in a wine-growing region:

March 7 & 8. From la Barque to Chagny. On the left are plains which extend to the Saone, on the right the ridge of mountains called the Cote. The plains are of a reddish-brown rich loam, mixed with much small stone. The Cote has for its basis a solid rock, on which is about a foot of soil and small stone, in equal quantities, the soil red and of middling quality. The plains are in corn; the Cote in vines. The former have no inclosures, the latter is in small ones of dry stone wall. There is a good deal of forest. Some small herds of small cattle and sheep. Fine mules, which come from Provence and cost twenty louis. They break them at two years old, and they last to thirty.

The corn lands here rent for about fifteen livres the arpent. They are now planting, pruning and sticking their vines. When a new vineyard is made, they plant the vines in gutters about four feet apart. As the vines advance, they lay them down. They put out new shoots and fill all the intermediate space, till all trace of order is lost. They have ultimately about one foot square to each vine. They begin to yield good profit at five or six years old, and last one hundred or one hundred and fifty years. A vigneron at Voulenay carried me into his vineyard, which was of ten arpents. He told me that some years it produced him sixty pieces of wine, and some not more than three pieces. The latter is the most advantageous produce, because the wine is better in quality and higher in price in proportion as less is made, and the expenses at the same time diminish in the same proportion. Whereas, when much is made, the expenses are increased, while the price and quality become less. In very plentiful years they often give one half the wine for casks to contain the other half. The cask for two hundred and fifty bottles costs six livres in scarce years and ten in plentiful. The Feuillette is of one hundred and twenty-five bottles, the Piece of two hundred and fifty, and the Queue or Botte of five hundred. An Arpent rents at from twenty to sixty livres. A farmer of ten arpents has about three labourers engaged by the year. He pays four louis to a man, and half as much to a woman, and feeds them. He kills one hog and salts it, which is all the meat used in the family during the year. Their ordinary food is bread and vegetables. At Pommard and Voulenay I observed them eating good wheat bread; at Meursault, rye. I asked the reason of this difference. They told me that the white wines fail in quality much oftener than the red, and remain on hand. The farmer therefore cannot afford to feed his labourers so well. At Meursault only white wines are made, because there is too much stone for the red. On such slight circumstances depends the condition of man! The wines which have given such celebrity to Burgundy grow only on the Cote, an extent of about five leagues long and half a league wide. They begin at Chambertin, and go through Vougeau, Romanie, Veaune, Nuys, Beaune, Pommard, Voulenay, Meursault, and end at Monrachet. Those of the two last are white, the others red. Chambertin, Vougeau and Veaune are strongest, and will bear transportation and keeping. They sell therefore on the spot for twelve hundred livres the queue, which is forty-eight sous the bottle. Voulenay is the best of the other reds, equal in flavour to Chambertin, etc., but being lighter, will not keep, and therefore sells for not more than three hundred livres the queue, which is twelve sous the bottle. It ripens sooner than they do, and consequently is better for those who wish to broach at a year old. In like manner of the white wines, and for the same reason, Monrachet sells for twelve hundred livres the queue (forty-eight sous the bottle). It is remarkable that the best of each kind, that is, of the red and white, is made at the extremities of the line, to wit, at Chambertin and Monrachet. It is pretended that the adjoining vineyards produce the same qualities, but that belonging to obscure individuals, they have not obtained a name, and therefore sell as other wines. The aspect of the Cote is a little south of east. The western side is also covered with vines, and is apparently of the same soil, yet the wines are of the coarsest kinds. Such too are those which are produced in the plains; but there the soil is richer and less strong. Vougeau is the property of the monks of Citeaux, and produces about two hundred pieces. Monrachet contains about fifty arpents, and produces, one year with another, about one hundred and twenty pieces. It belongs to two proprietors only, Monsieur de Clarmont, who leases to some wine merchants, and the Marquis de Sarsnet of Dijon, whose part is farmed to a Monsieur de la Tour, whose family for many generations have had the farm. The best wines are carried to Paris by land. The transportation costs thirty-six livres the piece. The more indifferent go by water. Bottles cost four and a half sous each.

The amount of actual hard work represented by this review of a local industry, is probably no more than most well-trained minds could get through in two days, but to keep up that pace for ninety consecutive days, like leaping hurdles, is another matter. It is nothing to leap two hurdles or three—any one can do it—but few can leap ninety hurdles at a stretch.

His journal takes account of many novelties and curiosities. At Pontac he is told of a seedless grape “which I did not formerly suppose to exist; but I saw at Marseilles dried raisins from Smyrna without seeds.” He finds strawberries and peas on the table at Castres, “so that the country on the canal of Languedoc seems to have later seasons than that east and west of it. What can be the cause?” After giving this the benefit of some speculations, with which he is apparently dissatisfied, he remarks that there are ortolans at Agen, but none at Bordeaux. He devotes two pages to a study of the phenomenon of alluvial formation in the rivers running into the Mediterranean. “Has this peculiarity of the Mediterranean any connexion with the scantiness of its tides, which even at the equinoxes are of two or three feet only?” He speculates on the origin of marine shells discovered on high ground, away from the ocean, deciding finally that it was not possible to accept any of the current hypotheses, although his own guess that “some throe of nature has forced up parts which had been the bed of the ocean,” turned out to be a fairly good one. He describes in detail the processes of butter-making and cheese-making at Rozzano, of rice-husking at Vercelli, two methods of vine-planting which were new to him, and one of planting corn. Noli was remarkable for a great growth of aloes which never flower; moreover, “a curious cruet for oil and vinegar in one piece, I saw here. A bishop resides here, whose revenue is two thousand livres, equal to sixty-six guineas. I heard a nightingale here.” The income of bishops seemed to interest him; he found a bishop residing at Albenga who got as much as forty thousand livres. He looked for plums at Brignolles, but found none, “which makes me conjecture that the celebrated plum of that name is not derived from this place.” At Marseilles, “I measured a mule, not the largest, five feet and two inches high.” In examining the locks of the canal of Languedoc, he calculated that five minutes were lost at every basin on account of the archaic mechanism in use for opening the gates; which in the aggregate came to one-eighth of the time spent in navigating the canal. He suggested a quadrantal gate, turning in a pivot and lifted by a lever, which “would reduce the passage from eight to seven days, and the freight equally.” An interesting anticipation occurs in his suggestion of a water-level highway from Spezia to Nice, whereby “travellers would enter Italy without crossing the Alps, and all the little insulated villages of the Genoese would communicate together, and in time form one continued village along that road.”

In the course of his excursion Mr. Jefferson remarks many matters that are reminiscent of distant days on the Virginia countryside. In Beaujolais, after mentioning “a very superior morsel of sculpture done by Slodtz in 1740,” a Diana and Endymion, in possession of a certain local amateur, he adds, “The wild gooseberry is in leaf; the white pear and sweet briar in bud.” On the ninth of April, near Nice, he writes, “The first frogs I have heard are of this day,” and nine days later, near Turin, “The first nightingale I have heard this year is today.” At Lyons he takes note that the nine arches of the Pont d’Ainay measure forty feet from centre to centre, and that “the almond is in bloom.” On looking at the Italian Riviera he writes with a slight accent of wistfulness that “if any person wished to retire from his acquaintance, to live absolutely unknown, and yet in the midst of physical enjoyments, it should be in some of the little villages of this coast, where air, water and earth concur to offer what each has most precious.”

IV

While in England, cooling his heels at the pleasure of the Marquis of Caermarthen, Mr. Jefferson employed his time in a methodical study of sixteen typical English gardens. He has some good things to say of the English technique of landscape-gardening, but is highly critical of the architecture that goes with it. The Corinthian arch at Stowe “has a very useless appearance, inasmuch as it has no pretension to any destination.” The architecture of the new house at Paynshill is “incorrect,” but the Doric temple on the premises is beautiful. “Architecture has contributed nothing” to the sightliness of the Leasowes in Shropshire. Aside from this record, which carries a curious air of perf unctoriness and enervation, there is little to show for his occupations of two months in England. He remarks in a letter to Madame de Corny that “the splendour of the shops is all that is worth looking at in London.” His account-book carries an entry of the customary shilling for seeing Shakespeare’s tombstone, and another shilling for seeing the house where Shakespeare was born; but nothing more of consequence.

In the spring of 1788, when he set forth in haste to the Hague to overhaul John Adams and hold his nose to the grindstone of American national finance at Amsterdam, he took the occasion for a tour of nearly two months in the agricultural districts of the Rhine and the border provinces of Alsace-Lorraine. Here his journal comes back to the spirited and energetic tone of his French journal, and it is in great part a similar record of observations upon agricultural matters. This tour, however, carried him through several Dutch and German cities, where he noticed a whole world of minor novelties, some of which he illustrated by drawings sketched into the text of his descriptive notes. Thus the first thing in Amsterdam that caught his eye was the “joists of houses placed not with their sides horizontally and perpendicularly, but diamond-wise, thus: first, for greater strength; second, to arch between with brick, thus: .” He also observed a new method of fixing a flagstaff to the mast of a ship; dining tables with folding leaves; “windows opening so that they admit air but not rain”—the upper sash swinging on a horizontal axis like a transom window, and the lower sash sliding up and down in the usual way. He made a minute description of the arrangement of a large private aviary kept by a rich merchant in the city, and he got detailed plans of a saw-mill driven by wind-power. He saw a lantern over a street door, so arranged as to throw light both outdoors and indoors equally. “It is a hexagon, and occupies the place of the middle pane of glass in the circular top of the street door.”

The only European art gallery ever singled out for special mention by Mr. Jefferson was the one at Düsseldorf, which he calls “sublime, particularly the room of Vanderwerff.” Why this collection of pictures should have so impressed him as to gain notice over those to which he undoubtedly had access in Paris and the Dutch cities—especially in a journal devoted almost exclusively to practical affairs—is not clear. At Coblenz he saw a device that was immensely to his heart; it was a central-heating system in the Elector’s palace, where “are large rooms very well warmed by warm air conveyed from an oven below, through tubes which open into the rooms.” In the village of Bergen, between Frankfort and Hanau, the “things worth noting here are: 1. A folding ladder. 2. Manner of packing china cups and saucers, the former in a circle within the latter. 3. The marks of different manufactures of china. . . . 4. The top rail of a wagon supported by the washers on the ends of the axle-trees.” At Mannheim, he took note of “an economical curtain bedstead,” with an arrangement of bent iron rods to support the curtains. He saw with extreme disfavour the bird of household legend at Frankfort. “The stork, or crane, is very commonly tame here. It is a miserable, dirty, ill-looking bird.” In Lorraine, as in Germany, he saw women doing all kinds of manual work, and their persistent love of ornament bore him eloquent testimony to the better way that things were managed in Virginia, where women did their duty in that station of life unto which it had pleased God to call them. He remarks this with a detachment so profound as to give his observations a patronizing air—one may charitably hope that they never fell under the eye of contemporary feminism, as represented by Mary Wollstonecraft, for example. “While one considers them as useful and rational companions, one can not forget that they are also objects of our pleasures; nor can they ever forget it. While employed in dirt and drudgery, some tag of a ribbon, some ring or bit of bracelet, earbob or necklace, or something of that kind, will show that the desire of pleasing is never suspended in them.” This “barbarous perversion of the natural destination of the two sexes” was due to the swollen military establishment which kept so many men out of industry. It was a sorry sight, which one could never get out of one’s memory. “Women are formed by nature for attentions, not for hard labour. A woman never forgets one of the numerous train of little offices which belong to her. A man forgets often.”

V

In the course of five years, Mr. Jefferson may be said to have examined every useful tree and plant in Western Europe, and studied its cultivation. He sends William Drayton “by Colonel Franks in the month of February last a parcel of acorns of the cork oak,” for the Agricultural Society of South Carolina, and some seeds of the sulla-grass, which, he explains, “is called by the names of Sulla and Spanish St. Foin, and is the Hedysarum coronarium of Linnæus.” To another correspondent he sends “some of the seeds of the Dionœa Muscipula, or Venus fly-trap, called also with you, I believe, the Sensitive Plant.” To another he writes, “I am making a collection of vines for wine and for the table.” He sends over to Monticello “a packet of the seeds of trees which I would wish Anthony to sow in a large nursery, noting well their names.” He had great hopes for culture of the olive. “The olive tree is assuredly the richest gift of heaven,” he wrote to his old preceptor, George Wythe, “I can scarcely except bread.” He sent over two shipments of about five hundred olive plants, to South Carolina, urging Drayton not to let unfamiliarity stand in their way. “The oil of the olive is an article the consumption of which will always keep pace with the production. Raise it, and it begets its own demand. Little is carried to America because Europe has it not to spare. We therefore have not learned the use of it. But cover the Southern States with it, and every man will become a consumer of oil within whose reach it can be brought in point of price.” The South Carolinians did not share his faith, however; for in 1813 he wrote to James Ronaldson that “it is now twenty-five years since I sent my southern fellow-citizens two shipments . . . of the olive tree of Aix, the finest olives in the world. If any of them still exist, it is merely as a curiosity in their gardens; not a single orchard of them has been planted.” He even tried to raise olives himself in Monticello, in company with a forlorn hope of Italian cherries, apricots and four varieties of almonds! Nothing ever came of his efforts in the matter of olive-culture; and nothing seems to have come of a consignment of caper plants which he sent over to South Carolina at about the same time that he sent the five hundred olive plants.

The fearful sacrifice of human life entailed upon Georgia and the Carolinas in the production of wet rice, “a plant which sows life and death with almost equal hand,” caused Mr. Jefferson to take great interest in the culture of dry rice. In the last year of his foreign service he managed somehow to get hold of a cask of upland rice from Africa, which he promptly “dispersed into many hands, having sent the mass of it to South Carolina,” where nothing came of the experiment; but being carried into the upper hilly parts of Georgia, “it succeeded there perfectly, has spread over the country and is now commonly cultivated.” He also contrived to get his hands on a few pounds of Egyptian rice and sent it over. He got interested in Chinese rice, through reading a book by a French official who had travelled there, and he expresses “considerable hopes of receiving some dry rice from Cochin-China, the young prince of that country, lately gone hence, having undertaken that it shall come to me.” The polite young Oriental’s undertaking was probably perfunctory, for nothing was heard of the rice. Twenty years later Mr. Jefferson sent out a tracer in the person of a Dr. de Carro who was going that way, but with no results. Inquiry among Parisian dealers brought the Piedmont rice to his attention. He could not be quite sure whether the difference between this and the Carolina rice was a difference in the grain or in the method of cleaning, and he made a note of the matter as something to be looked into when he went down into the South of France. “I had expected to satisfy myself at Marseilles,” but there seemed to be no one there who knew any more than the Parisians about the way of cleaning rice in Lombardy, or the style of machinery used. “I therefore determined to sift the matter to the bottom” by making “an excursion of three weeks into the rice country beyond the Alps, going through it from Cercelli to Pavia, about sixty miles.” Here he found that the process and the machinery were nothing new, and hence “there was but one conclusion, then, to be drawn, to wit, that the rice was of a different species.” He found moreover that the government of Turin was so well aware of this difference that “they prohibit the exportation of rough rice on pain of death.” Nevertheless he reports to his superior in the Department of Foreign Affairs, who was then the exemplary John Jay, that “I have taken measures, however, which I think will not fail for obtaining a quantity of it, and I bought on the spot a small parcel.”

He does not tell the profound and austere Secretary what these measures were; but they come out in the diary of his travels. “Poggio, a muleteer, who passes every week between Vercelli and Genoa, will smuggle a sack of rough rice for me to Genoa; it being death to export it in this form.” To keep a sheet-anchor to windward of this enterprise, since for some reason he had “no great dependence on its success,” he stowed away the contents of the small parcel on his own person, “as much as my coat and surtout pockets would hold,” and made his way unostentatiously across the frontier into free Genoa, his raiment bulging all over with contraband rice. Poggio turned out to be worthy of confidence; he also ran the blockade successfully; muleteer and diplomat met in triumph at Genoa, and promptly shipped off the fruits of iniquity to South Carolina and Georgia.

VI

It was all to the good; it would all come handy when one got back to the New World. First, there was Monticello, which one could make a great experiment-station in everything that was new, practical and beautiful. All the new ideas, the new agricultural processes, the new devices —the folding ladder, the hexagonal lantern, the “economical curtain bedstead,” and all the rest—could be tried out there, perhaps improved, and disseminated among one’s fellow-workers. It had been a good five years; and now it was time to go home, reclaim one’s property from “the ravages of overseers,” and get to work in earnest. One might so easily have too much of a good thing. “Travelling makes men wiser, but less happy,” Mr. Jefferson wrote a nephew. “When men of sober age travel, they gather knowledge which they may apply usefully for their country; but they are subject ever after to recollections mixed with regret; their affections are weakened by being extended over more objects; and they learn more habits which can not be gratified when they return home.” The public service needed him no longer. He would retain his ambassadorship, go back to Paris for a few months, more or less as a visitor, “to see the end of the Revolution, which I then thought would be certainly and happily closed in less than a year”; and that would end his office holding. The Constitution had been drafted; it did not suit him, but he had written long letters of advice to Madison and others concerning its amendment—advice which was being satisfactorily followed. He had heard of a political party-division on an issue called Federalism. He did not know much about this, and when it was explained to him by letter, he took instinctively a Pauline view of it. “I am not a Federalist,” he wrote Hopkinson, shortly before leaving France, “because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all. Therefore I am not of the party of Federalists. But I am much farther from that of the anti-Federalists.” Being neither for the Jew nor for the Greek, he was for the new creature. When he returned to America, would he find himself alone in this view? He had an uneasy sense of the need to get acquainted with his countrymen; times change, and a people changes with them. There were rumours, indeed, that a great spiritual change had already come over America. “I hope to receive soon permission to visit America this summer,” he wrote Colonel Humphreys, “and to possess myself anew, by conversation with my countrymen, of their spirit and ideas. I know only the Americans of the year 1784. They tell me this is to be much a stranger to those of 1789.”