certain "natural rights," when we formed our government one to "government" and the other to majorities. He contended that the business of government was to make these natural rights more secure; that its chief business was to be a fence around them and a bulwark of protection for them. In his view, government is not an end, but a means a means to defend and increase the liberty and happiness of the men and women living in the country governed, who, however, are the safest, and the only rightful guardians of their own private concerns; that government is good in proportion as it is responsible to and supervisable by the people.

Jefferson maintained truthfully, too, I think, that men were divided politically into two classes; those who fear and distrust the people, and those who identify themselves with the people, as a part of them.

I heard Governor Woodrow Wilson once express it very well in designating the first class as men, who spoke of "the people" as something outside - beyond themselves. There is nothing more significant than one's way of looking upon the people; one man looks at them as an alien thing, and another sees himself in them, or perhaps better, sees them glassed in himself.

In a letter to Du Pont de Nemours, which may be found in Jefferson's "Works," Volume 10, page 23 (Washington edition), we find this language: "We both love the people, but you love them as infants, whom you are afraid to trust without nurses, and I as adults, whom I freely leave to self-government."

Of course, no sincere man ever professed perfect confidence in the people doing the right thing at all

times, but the difference is one of degrees of approximation to perfect and perpetual confidence. Men like Hamilton habitually distrusted the masses, because they sincerely did not believe that the masses had brains enough to understand things, and to do them. They wanted strong government to restrain the people. Men like Jefferson wanted a strong people, to restrain the government, and knew that the moral sense, inborn in men, has as much to do with right government as intellect or any other one thing.

The fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the day upon which he and John Adams were destined each to draw his last breath, was approaching. The Mayor of the city of Washington, in the name of its citizens, had invited Jefferson to be present at its celebration in that city. On June 24, 1826, he wrote a letter to the Mayor, a Mr. Weightman. In that letter, speaking of the Declaration of Independence, he says:

"May it be to the world, what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind have not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, and by the grace of God. There are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and inspire an undiminished devotion to them."

Note: It is the "Rights of Man" yet, as in his youth. It is no "glittering generality" to him. God grant that it may never be so to us!

This again indicates how Jefferson's mind inevitably refused to confine its vision, when contemplating the blessings of liberty and democracy, to American territory, and how invariably it wandered out to the utmost confines of the earth, wherever there were men with rights to assert and with duties to perform. His was, in the broadest and finest sense, a world-democracy. He appreciated, too, what few men appreciated, when he wrote them, that the broad abstract expressions of the Declaration constituted a logos; a word to go out, a germ to grow rather than a statute presently to demark.

Like so many old men, when dying, his mind went back to the scenes of activity in which he had been engaged in his early manhood. Partially arising in the bed, and using his right hand, as if writing upon a tablet held in his left, he exclaimed: "Warn the committee to be on the alert!" It was like Stonewall Jackson's exclamation, "Order A. P. Hill to prepare for action!" "Warn the committee to be on the alert!" What committee? Doubtless, one of the old committees of safety of the revolutionary day, who not only constituted a provisional government, but exercised disciplinary authority over the disaffected and the disloyal, and whose duty it was to defeat any counterrevolutionary movements or combinations. "The ruling passion was strong in death," and we may be sure that Jefferson's right hand had written many a message similar to this last exclamation.

Mr. Merriam informs us that "by the later thinkers the idea that men possess inherent and inalienable rights of a political or quasi-political character, which are independent of the state, has been generally given up." Pity it is, if true! He adds in another place that "the present tendency in American political theory is to disregard the once dominant ideas of natural rights and of the social contract, although it must be admitted that the political scientists are more agreed upon this point than is the general public." I should hope so! I would hate to see the idea prevail among the people that liberties are a grant of government, instead of government being a delegation of power by the people, and I predict it never will until the downfall of this "Republic of Lesser Republics.'

Some of the latter-day political "scientists" seem to want the world governed by experts. One of them speaks of a "central academy of science, which shall stand in the same relation to the control of men, in which a polytechnic institute stands to the control of nature!" In other words, individual rights and liberties are to count for nothing in comparison with scientific efficiency of bureaucratic administration. One of them does admit that "social interference" (that is, governmental interference) "should not be so paternal, as to check the self-extinction of the morally ill-constituted; ... nor should it so limit the struggle for existence, as to nullify the selective process.' Thank God for small favors! The right of selfextinguishment at least is still left us by college governmental scientists!

These people, it seems to me, forget the two great

est of facts-God and The Man. They forget the Individual, who is born and comes into the world, and who dies and goes out of it alone, with no company save the Divine Individuality. However, I suppose a reference to that is "unscientific."

There is an American political theory, right or wrong, and it is Jefferson's theory. When he overcame the Counter-Revolution, he made it ours by a new birth — a regeneration.

It is a curious thing that no new party has broken away from the old ones without founding itself allegedly upon the views of Thomas Jefferson and the doctrines of the Declaration of Independence, and that just in the measure that old parties desert them, just in that measure can you forecast their defeat. This was the case, of course, with Democratic-Republicans - the party founded by Jefferson. It was the pretention of the early Whigs. It was the assertion of the early Republicans, and notably of Abraham Lincoln; and it is curious that in the so-called "Bull Moose" Convention - during this year, Jefferson's portrait was hung conspicuously high, and the party pretended to draw faith from him, notwithstanding all the sneering and unjust things that had been written about Jefferson by Mr. Roosevelt, its candidate. This Declaration of Independence was a summary expression, in Jefferson's words and manner, of what had become the common and characteristic thought of a majority of the American people, and was intensely his own. It remains the common thought of the American people, and constitutes the Soul-Politic, which dwells within and animates and energizes our Body-Politic.