gate the thoughts of his teeming brain. She gave him the genuine spirit of sympathy, with the commoner rather than with the aristocrat, with the poor rather than with the rich, with the slave rather than with the master. This was the true secret of his power. His broad humanity was not a pose. His simplicity of attire, his plainness of manner was not a flout. His exquisite response to the deeper tones of popular conviction was not an echo. In him the nobler aspirations of his fellow-men became articulate in yet nobler forms. Shams never gain permanent power; and Thomas Jefferson through the long years of a great public life was the foremost statesman of his time and the greatest party leader of all the ages. Under him the Democratic party in America attained a solidity, a unity, a force never since equalled, and attained it because their master and their mouthpiece had an abiding and an unshakable faith in Democracy, because he was "not one of those who fear the people.”

JEFFERSON THE REFORMER.

On 2d September, 1776, Jefferson resigned his seat in Congress, declining also the mission to France, left Philadelphia and turned his face homeward. Anxiety concerning the health of a beautiful, fragile and loving wife was cause enough to draw the young statesman back to Virginia, now that his work in Congress had reached a culmination so glorious. The approaching session of the Virginia Legislature, the first under the new State Constitution, gave added force to his desire to live and labor once more within the boundaries of his native state. He was at once chosen a delegate from Albemarle county and on 7th October, 1776, took his seat in the Legislature.

The laws of Virginia, transferred from England to the Colony in an earlier and more cruel age, sorely needed revision. The great estates of the tobacco lords had been created and were unjustly protected under their malign influence; and the social order thus sustained was ready to perish from the vices always engendered by irresponsible power and protected wealth. The criminal code was inhuman and only its lax administration made life under it endurable. And the burden of the support of an established church fell with an insulting force on the consciences of men who rejected its doctrines and righteously despised the great body of its priests. No man felt more poignantly

than Jefferson the need of amendment; no man knew better than he how to carry out the work.

Of the vast number of measures, in perfecting which he acted alone or took a leading part, it must here suffice to give only a condensed list of the most important. These are:

(a) The establishment of new courts of justice for the new state.

(b) The abolition of the laws of entail.

(c) Abolition of the laws of primogeniture.

(d) The restoration of Rights of Conscience in Religion. (e) The establishment of rights of Naturalization and Expatriation.

(f) The abolition of the Slave Trade (passed in 1778). (g) The revision of the Laws; and in connection therewith (h) The establishment of Religious Freedom (passed in 1786).

(i) The creation of a System of Public Education, and (j) The gradual abolition of Slavery in Virginia.

Jefferson's plan for the gradual emancipation of the slaves was so hopeless of success that it was never even brought before the Legislature. He himself perceived that "the public mind would not bear it." With equal clearness he saw that unless some workable scheme of gradual emancipation were devised and adopted, the worst would follow. As the negroes increased, as the whole industrial system of the Slave States came to depend more and more on slave labor, the obstacles to any peaceful solution of the problem grew and multiplied. Shortly after Jefferson's futile proposition was brought forward, Monroe could say, "It is easy enough to kill slavery, but what will you do with the corpse?" The question confronts us today. Slavery is slain, but what are we to do with the corpse? Here it lies, stretched out from the Potomac to the Rio Grande in all its black, repellant bulk, and no man knows how or where to bury it.

The bill creating a System of Public Education was postponed until 1796 and then passed only as to Elementary Schools. Even this Act was rendered nugatory by a hostile amendment, which left compliance with the law to the option of the county courts. Thus after waiting twenty years Jefferson saw the one measure which he deemed the article of a standing or

falling democracy, defeated by a subterfuge; and needed to wait for another twenty years before he began to effectuate even a portion of that first capacious plan in creating a university for his native state.

The other measures of fundamental import for the emancipation of Virginia he carried through either then or soon after. The lurid phrase which leaped from his pen amid the heats of later conflicts,

"I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."

was but the morbid reflex of his saner mood in this great combat of his vibrant manhood. His assault upon the tyranny of the slave holder came to grief. His assault upon the tyranny of public illiteracy captured nothing but a watch-tower. But when the combat was over, the tyranny of cruel laws and savage penalties was gone from Virginia forever; the tyranny of a decadent caste, propped up against collapse only by the injustices of entail and primogeniture, was crushed; and the tyranny of an established church had been replaced by the equality of all Christian brotherhoods in the eye of the law as in the eye of heaven.

We cannot wonder that the Virginian aristocrats looked upon Jefferson as an enemy to his caste, as a traitor to his birthright, and pursued him with hostilities and maledictions, down to the second and third generation. Nor can we feel surprise that the Episcopal clergy counted him among the deadly foes of that faith in which his ancestors had lived and in whose bosom he himself had been cradled. But it is strange that the dissenting clergy, the very men from whose limbs his hand had stricken off the shackles, should have united with the rest to revile him and persecute him. In their homes and in their pulpits, in written document and public speech, they stigmatized as atheist and apostate, as sensualist and debauchee, this young ruler whom Jesus Himself might have looked upon and loved. Not the least extraordinary outcome of all this animosity was his unbroken hold upon the great mass of his constituents. His profound conviction that the hope of Virginia, of America, lay not in the aristocrat nor in the priest, but in the thoughtful

mass of his fellow-countrymen, penetrated their souls and in spite of defamation held for him the unshakable citadel of their loyalty and their love.

Passing over the record of Jefferson as Governor of Virginia from 1779 to 1781, as not vitally connected with our immediate topic, we turn to his work in Congress to which he was again elected in June, 1783. Congress assembled at Trenton in November after the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown, 19th October, 1783, had practically closed the war. Thence they adjourned to Annapolis, and there it was Jefferson's privilege to arrange the noble ceremonial with which Congress received the resignation of the victorious Commander-in-Chief and to compose the address delivered by the President of the Congress on that occasion. He was chairman also of the Congressional Committee which on behalf of the United Colonies signed the treaty of peace with Great Britain, in which was at last recognized that Independence which had been so eloquently declared by him in 1776.

Only two bills of fundamental and permanent importance were passed by this Congress, notorious as the most contentious in our history. Both were drawn by Jefferson. One was the bill establishing our present system of coinage and currency on the decimal basis instead of the duodecimal basis recommended by the Financier of Congress, Robert Morris. The incomparable advantages of the decimal basis have been attested not only by the experience of America, but by the imitation of almost every civilized nation.

The other bill was the Ordinance of the Northwestern Territory, establishing a plan of temporary government for this region, which Virginia with the consent and co-operation of the other states had ceded to the United States. The Jeffersonian bill was so drawn as to prohibit slavery after 1800 in all the region west of the meridian of the western cape of the mouth of the Great Kanawha. This provision was lost because only six of the states voted for it instead of seven. Had both the delegates from New Jersey been in their places or had either one of Jefferson's own colleagues, Hardy and Mercer, sustained him, this clause would have been adopted and our great Civil War would never have been fought. Mr. Spaight, of North Carolina,

deserves the unhappy fame of having compassed the defeat of this vital clause and brought upon his country the disastrous conflict over negro slavery. The later ordinance of 1787, one of the immortal documents in our political history, made free soil of the Northwestern states alone. Jefferson's law would have secured freedom not for the Northwest only, but for Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, the entire Louisiana Purchase, Texas, and every state west of the Mississippi River.

Jefferson had now reached the loftiest plane of his public career. His genius had blossomed into its consummate flower. His fertile and originative mind had laid the broad and deep foundations of American Nationality and had transformed his native state from a mediaeval colony into a modern commonwealth. Virginia had received at his hands the triple crown of political freedom, of religious freedom, and of social freedom, while from him the infant nation derived not only the power to grow, but the law for her future expansion. The cession of the great Northwestern territory to the general government and the law of its organization into new states was his work; and this is the law, potent as the principle of universal gravitation, which has created and is creating a modern nation. Under its action the thirteen new stars which rose in the western heavens in 1783 have grown into a great planetary system, in which each star sweeps through its own orbit, while all the stars march together in eternal union along one glorious and predestined path.

If time permitted, we might endeavor to complete the outline of Jefferson's great public career. We should see his deep soul brooding over the problem of his country's future development, until his thought swept beyond the Mississippi and grasped the continental conception of her destiny; until the compulsive force of this vast ideal nerved him to brave-since he could not bribe-the great Napoleon himself; until the swift tides of European politics made of Napoleon's necessities Jefferson's allies, and enabled him to pour the riches of Louisiana into the young Republic's lap.

We should see him year after year planning to open up divided the United States from the Pacific; suggesting explorations from the West as well as from the East; until at last he