was able to send on this task Meriwether Lewis, his former private secretary, and William Clarke, brother to George Rogers Clarke, who had conquered the Northwestern territory for Virginia. These bold pioneers, acting upon Jefferson's commission, laid the foundation of our future successful claim upon the Oregon country.

We should see him as Washington's Secretary of State brought into collision with the most powerful and alert of all his adversaries, Alexander Hamilton; the one with his birthright in American soil, the other an alien serving an adopted country; the one a democrat with aristocrat lineage, the other a commoner with all the vacuous pride of a partician; the one with his noble faith in the people, the other thinking of the mass as a vast, blind, raging Polyphemus, incapable of selfcontrol and unfit to be trusted with power. We should see Jefferson forced by this antagonism from his stand as an impartial and far-seeing patriot into the position of the founder and leader of a great political party. We should see the final overthrow of Federalism, after Federalism had done its appointed work for the nation, and the establishment of Representative Democracy as the living principle of the future for the American Nation.

We should see him in the brief retirement to Monticello, when wearied brain and tortured heart sank into the healing bath of quiet and peace and love. The serene skies of his Virginian home bent their blue arch above him. The tender voices of his daughters and his grand-children caressed him into forgetfulness of the hatreds and turmoils of his storm-tossed years. From the shelves of his library, enriched by liberal purchases among the book-stalls of Paris, the sages and the saints of all the ages spoke their message of consolation and inspiration to his soul. It was this religious retreat into the sanctuary of his home which healed the wounds of his soul and made possible the triumphs of his later years. Even the duties of the Vice-Presidency did not remove him far or long from that best beloved of all the mountains of the earth. They served only to give him closer contact with the friends and allies of his public life. When by a "kind of miracle"-to use Hamilton's pungent phrase-John Adams was elected President, Jef

ferson rejoiced in his victory. He was a man careless of dignities, indifferent to profit, but avaricious of power. Under the stress of his conflict with Hamilton the postulates of Democracy had been exalted in his mind from the realm of reason into the realm of faith. They became his Articles of Religion, and the war against Federalism was a holy crusade. The Vice-Presidency was the commanding and impregnable citadel from which he conducted the war to complete and conclusive victory.

And then we should see him exalted to the Presidential office and preaching thence the simple evangel of Democracy by act as well as by voice and pen. In recent years contemporary documents have come to light that take the place of all those foolish inventions of political foes which made the vulgar gossip of alleged historians of the times. The dispatch of Dr. William Thornton, then in charge of the British Legation, to Lord Grenville in London, gives the authentic story of his inauguration. "Mr. Jefferson," he wrote, "came from his own lodging to the Capitol on foot, in his ordinary dress, escorted by a body of militia artillery from the neighboring state, and accompanied by the Secretaries of the Navy and the Treasury, and a number of his political friends in the House of Representatives." The inaugural address was delivered in the Senate Chamber. The oath of office was administered by Chief Justice Marshall. Samuel Harrison Smith, the founder of the National Intelligencer, in a private letter to his sister, dated 5th July, 1801, gave an interesting account of Jefferson's first official reception. The guests, who included "all the public officers and most of the respectable citizens and strangers of distinction," were ushered into the room "where sat Mr. Jefferson surrounded by the five Cherokee Chiefs. After a conversation of a few minutes he invited his guests into the usual dining room, where four large sideboards were covered with refreshments, as cakes of various kinds, wine, punch, and so on. Every citizen was invited to partake. All appeared cheerful, all happy. Mr. Jefferson mingled promiscuously with the citizens, and far from designating any particular friend for consultation, conversed for a short time with every one who came in his way. In her private notebooks written in 1841, and not intended for publication, Mrs. Smith, who had been Margaret Bayard, of Delaware, and came

thus originally from the very camp of his enemies, tells us something of Jefferson's attire and dress. "If Mr. Jefferson's dress was plain, unstudied, and sometimes old-fashioned in its form, it was always of the finest materials. In his personal habits he was always fastidiously neat; and if in his manner he was simple, affable and unceremonious, it was not because he was ignorant of, but because he despised the conventional and artificial usages of courts and fashionable life. His external appearance had no pretentions to elegance, but it was neither coarse nor awkward; and it must be owned his greatest personal attraction was a countenance beaming with benevolence and intelligence." Such contemporary testimonials are the best refutation of all the stupid and malicious calumnies which once gathered about Jefferson's great name. His slovenly attire, his vulgar manners, his rude address, his dusky concubines, his flouts at religion, his flatteries of the vulgar, all these were the cheap inventions of an ignoble political hostility. Once they did harm, today they are impotent. They simply pollute the pages on which Scandal masquerades as History. They are no longer able to shake the faith of mankind in the prevalent virtue, the lofty genius, the broad benignity of the greatest statesman of the modern world. Well may we say with Parton,

"If Jefferson was wrong, America is wrong.
If America is right, Jefferson was right."

Last of all we should once more see Jefferson in retirement on his mountain home. The storms of politics rage about the levels beneath his feet, but he heeds them little. Far around the head of this great, calm, foreseeing, deep-pondering man the serene heavens pour their radiant light. He sees that the great destiny of the nation he had aided to bring into being, whose infancy he had helped to foster, whose vigorous youth he had contributed to nurture and to train, was in the safeguard of that great power which guides the fortunes of men and of nations. His heart is at rest, his soul reposes in the confidence of a certain hope. And now he sets about the last work for his country's good that his hands were to find to do. He takes up again the problem of public education, which had occupied his earliest

days, and he builds for Virginia a state university, the first true university in America, the prototype of all those great state schools and universities, which today bring their united energies to the work of exalting the intelligence and virtue and patriotism of our common country.

The university which was Jefferson's ideal, the university which he strove to create, was a great democratic seminary, organized not for the advancement of learning, but for the training of men. Its product was not to be savants, but citizens. To his own university and to others like it, he looked for that gift of intellectual freedom which can alone make the Representative Democracy of America the ultimate solution of the great problem of state-craft. Slaves are unfit to govern either themselves or others, whether that slavery be of the body, or of the soul, or of the mind. Happy in all things, in his death as in his life, the old man was given time to accomplish this ultimate task and then lay down to rest. On the western slope of Monticello, facing the sunset glories of the region which his genius added to his country's domain, his ashes lie beneath the simple Ishaft on which stands the brief record of his wondrous life. He felt that heaven had granted him the grace to do for America three noble things-to achieve for his people political freedom, to establish for his country religious freedom, and to organize the foundations of intellectual freedom, and so he wrote for himself this modest epitaph:

Here was buried

Thomas Jefferson

Author

of the Declaration of Independence

of

The Statute of Virginia

for Religious Freedom and

Father of the University

of Virginia.

Gen. Cates:-Mr. President, I desire to move that we now tender to Dr. Thornton our sincere thanks for his splendid address upon that great advocate of human rights and the real founder of democrary, and by a rising vote.

Motion seconded.

The President:-You have heard the motion of Gen. Cates. All in favor of the motion will please stand.

The President:-It is unanimous.

Mr. R. G. Brown:-We have listened to a great paper; a masterly paper of English Literature, and I have been infused with the spirit of it. I, for one, as a member of this Bar Association, am unwilling that this paper should have its preservation merely in the memorials of our annual works, and I therefore move you, Mr. President, that this address be printed and bound by the Bar Association of Tennessee, and distributed among every member of this Association.

The President:-I will say, for the benefit of Mr. Brown, that this address is, as it should be, a copyright paper, and we can only print it in the annual minutes of the Association.

As to that, however, I will say that notwithstanding the fact that Dr. Thornton is not a member of the Bar, I have made an investigation of our constitution, and I find that he is more than qualified to Honorary Membership in this Association, which requires only that he should be learned in the law. I will therefore, recognize Mr. Brown in a motion to suspend the rules, and elect Dr. Thornton an Honorary member of this Association.

Mr. Brown:-I deem it an honor to make the motion.

Motion seconded, put before the Association and carried unanimously.

The President:-Dr. Thornton, you are unanimously elected an Honorary Member of this Association.

Dr. Thornton:-Gentlemen, I thank you.