poor"; whenever such a statement can be made of any people, progress has ceased and decay set in.

An aristocracy of intelligence, virtue, meritorious achievement, Mr. Jefferson recognized as all men recognize it; but this natural aristocracy owes no homage to mere wealth. Its glorious ranks draw, from hovels, recruits who come uniformed in sober gray, as well as from mansions, where purple and fine linen are worn.

To found aristocracy on birth and hereditary wealth is to make accident the test, depriving nature of its right to select. To make character, intelligence, noble work, high purpose, the standard is to put it where the golden spur will be worn by him who wins it.

In the order of nature, no Chatterton would starve in his garret, having stretched out his hand in vain supplication to Walpole, the grandee.

Only in a system where diabolical art, contrivance, selfish convention, had thwarted nature would Burns break his heart in squalid povertylacking the cost of the daily feed of the Duke of Devonshire's dogs.

It was not nature, but a system carved out with pens, barriers thrown up by statute, which kept Oliver Goldsmith under the wheels, while Marquises of Queensbury and Dukes of Grafton rode in the gilded coach.

Thomas Paine writes Common Sense to re

deem a people and make them happy; his reward is a debit account of about one hundred dollars, which he must pay to his publisher.

Edmund Burke writes his pamphlet against democracy, and his reward is the smile of a King, applause of the aristocracy, and a pension of ten thousand dollars per annum, which democratic taxpayers must pay.

Nature is not so unjust. Every beast of the field had its chance to graze; every bird of the air its chance to fly and feed; every fish of the sea its chance to swim and live. The strongest, the fittest, survived the competition; but the chance to compete was always there.

Democracy aims to give all a chance. It refuses to entrench any class in the secure possession of the blessings of nature, to the exclusion of all other classes. It refuses to admit that all the merit is to be found in any one class. It refuses to believe that the family which is noblest to-day will be the noblest a thousand years from to-day. It refuses to despair of the poor and ignorant; refuses to stop the wheels of evolution; declines to close the avenues of promotion; refuses to put up social, political, educational barriers which none but the wealthy may pass; refuses to lend its law-making power to the strong who would exact eternal tribute from the weak. That the strong are strong, democracy can not help; but it can avoid the deep

damnation of helping the strong to oppress the weak.

In nature the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; in class legislation, in class government, it invariably is, the law being made for the purpose.

Democratic in the highest, best sense of the word, Mr. Jefferson now buckled on his armor to wage war with the aristocracy of Virginia. The contest was stubborn, bitter, and protracted; but his triumph was complete in the end. He unfettered the land, changed the tenure from fee tail to fee simple, made the soil democratic, and made the law to correspond. Henceforth the family estate was to be divided equally among all the children.

CHAPTER XV

RELIGION AND SLAVERY

THERE was a union of Church and State in Virginia, as there was in other colonies, and as there was in the various countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa. From Dahomey to London the law was the same. The priest taught the people to obey the king, the king commanded the people to support the priest. Frightful laws against treason safeguarded the power of the king, and were upheld by the priest; laws equally terrible screened the priest from criticism, and were enforced by the king. The people obeyed both, paid both, and were cruelly maltreated by both.

Written in London and sent over to the colony, the Virginia laws against heresy were as savage a set as ever disgraced the books. Had the early Virginians been as much given to pious practises

as the Puritan brethren of New England, there might have been a reign of religious terror South as there was North. Fortunately for humanity, the early Virginian was an easy-going, generous-tempered mortal, who never could have found luxury in whipping bare-shouldered women, pressing old men to death under piles of stone, torturing little children to extort evidence against their parents, and fattening the gallows upon the rottening bodies of witches and Quakers.

The Virginia code, written under the supervision of London ecclesiastics, was bloody enough to have pleased Loyola or Torquemada, but it was treated as all Christian nations now treat the sublime moral code of Christ-all believe and none practise.

Open, defiant rebellion against the Church would have been put down in Virginia; and when Baptists and Quakers came noisily along disturbing everybody in the effort to teach them something and make them think, the conservatives, who already knew all they wanted and who did not wish to think, rose up and asserted the rights of the orthodox.

The fussy, clamorous Baptist having been put into the well-ventilated pen which they called prison, he was left to preach through the cracks to whoever would listen; while the parson, the magistrate, the squire, the vestryman, and the faithful