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The salient points of this theory are: first, natural, inalienable, God-given individual rights "the things of the first table;" secondly, local self-government, with most numerous and important powers conferred upon that part of the government, which is nearest the individual citizen with less and less power delegated to each other government which controls him, in proportion as it is further away; until finally, the least of all jurisdiction is delegated to that government, which is most distant from him and which he can watch least well, and which can know least well his wants and interests.

The Jeffersonian theory involves a distinct demarcation between state and national powers. It involves, yes, necessitates, an educational system to inform a public opinion, which shall thereby become fit to rule and govern. To this I shall refer later.

None of the attacks upon democracy, based upon the errors and impulses and the wild passions of revolutionists in France, South America, or elsewhere, has ever for long shaken the American people's confidence in their doctrine.

It is curious that, while American writers have deceived themselves so much about the source of the principles which actuated Thomas Jefferson, referring many of his opinions back to the French philosophers, etc., the French writers, as a rule, make no such mistake. Cornelius de Witt, who had made some study of our revolutionary period, says:

"Sauf Montesquieu, nos écrivains y étaient peu lus et peu cités. Coke, Milton, Locke, Grotius, et surtout la Bible, la grande charte, le common law, l'histoire d'Angleterre, les chartes et les histoires

locales, telles furent les autorités qu' invoquèrent les tribuns, les prédicateurs et les pamphlétaires qui excitèrent le peuple américain a combattre pour ses droits. Je n'ai jamais recontré dans leur bouche, ni le nom de Rousseau, ni l'expression du souveraineté du peuple."

2. IN FRANCE

How much influence Jefferson had upon the actors in the early stages of the French Revolution nobody will ever know. Both the modesty of the man and his delicate situation as Minister to France prevented his telling it. But on July 9, 1789, the Duke of Dorset, British Ambassador at Paris, wrote to the Prime Minister: "Mr. Jefferson, the American Ambassador at this court, has been a great deal consulted by the principal leaders of the Tiers État; and I have great reason to think that it is owing to his advice that the order called itself L'Assemblée Nationale." If so, this was the initial step, without taking which the Third Estate and democracy were lost. It was the sine qua non of all that came after.

In a letter to Madison in 1789, Jefferson speaks of the French revolutionists regarding us as "a model for their imitation," and says: "Our [authority] has been treated like that of the Bible, open to explanation, but not to question."

The American Revolution had been in a double sense one of the causes of the French Revolution. First, it sent back to France besides private soldiers, who had opened wide their eyes at the spectacle of a country without nobility or peasants, also young captains and colonels and majors and a few generals even-generally of the poorer nobility - who had caught the American spirit and found it incompatible with the

ancien régime and preferable to it. But it was a cause of the French Revolution in another and sadder sense. The American war had cost the court of France a great deal of money, had contributed to the consumption of its funds on hand, almost to the destruction of its credit.

We may imagine how Jefferson, whose Declaration of Independence, whose "Summary View," whose preamble to the Virginia Constitution, whose statute of Religious Freedom, and, finally, whose liberal sentiments scattered here and there in the "Notes on Virginia" had made him a forerunner in the expression and advocacy of "the rights of man," became the consultee and counsellor of the so-called patriotic party. His habit of arriving at political principles by deduction, while also relying on legal and historical authority, was a habit which he carried to France and did not bring away from there, except in the shape in which he had carried it. The former is a Celtic trait. Jefferson was Welsh — a Celt. But it did not turn his head. In fact, his advice to the French revolutionists — to Lafayette especially -was upon much more conservative lines than any declaration of policy ever made by him in America, than any political act of his in America. In France, as in America, he reasoned that the best attainable should be procured, and he realized that the best attainable in France at that time was far, far, behind the best attainable in America. Cornelius de Witt says that "it was in Paris Jefferson learned to abhor the whole social organization of Europe and everything appertaining to it still existing in America; it was in Paris that he learned to hate the power both

of the aristocracy and clergy, which till then he had opposed without any irritation." And Hazen, in his "Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution," says that, after his stay in France, his utterances became "not the sober thought of a judge, but rather the war cry of the republican militant."

Through it all, he seems to have seen clearly that for which the French people were "ripe," to use his favorite word. Jefferson knew the great truth, that a given thing may be a bad thing for one place and time, and a good thing for another. Hence he advised the British model as a working initiative government for the French, while he afterwards in America spent his whole life denouncing the same model, as a thoroughly unfit thing for the American people, who had long since passed the stage of growth, when that suit of clothes could fit them. I find no more inconsistency in this than in a physician's giving a delirium tremens patient moderate doses of whiskey, that he may not die from shock to his system, by sudden change.

Those who dwell upon the failure of the French Revolution to accomplish step-by-step progress without violence, and call Jefferson a doctrinaire, because he hoped it, forget that the experiment was tried under more unfavorable circumstances than perhaps a similar experiment was ever tried anywhere else. In a bread famine, during an unprecedented cold winter, amidst the clash of arms, with desperate and reckless traitors to be put down at home, it would have been a miracle, if an untrained crew upon the ship "Institutional Reform" had been held in discipline.

Up to the time that Jefferson left France, there was

doubt, of course, and apprehension of failure, which he himself expressed, but there was no reason to despair of a successful issue.

Hazen concludes that Jefferson "sailed for home with the conviction that within a year one of the greatest of recorded revolutions would have been effected without bloodshed." This is inaccurate. Had he said, “with the hope," instead of "with the conviction," he would have been right, for Jefferson's letters from France are full of expressions of uneasiness and apprehension. Hazen adds: "And when the bloodshed began in grim earnest, he refused to see its significance, minimized its importance, and was reluctant to believe that a beautiful dream might become a hideous, repulsive monstrosity." If all this were true, it would not be to Jefferson's discredit. But it is not true. He did see its significance; he did regret its necessary bearing; he did see the present "hideous, repulsive monstrosity," but he saw something behind it, or rather ahead of it. He saw the ultimate issue- liberty and a new era - not only for France, but for the European race. He minimized the "present hideousness" only in the sense that he thought the ultimate result was worth purchasing, even at the cost of such days of terror, as seemed in the providence of God necessary to be endured, in order to topple over despotism, special privilege, priestcraft, and all forms of rule by the "booted and spurred," trained to believe that the masses of mankind are "bridled and saddled." Most of us see now what Jefferson saw then, and what Burke did not, and Adams did not, and Hamilton did not see. He was one of the very few well-born, wealthy and

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