Thomas Clarkson was a school boy." His statute of religious liberty I shall dwell upon in a subsequent lecture. It was the first example in a Christian country of absolute freedom of public worship, not only for all Christians, but for all religionists of every sort guaranteeing freedom of belief and freedom of worship

cutting off all possible forms of legal persecution, and all control by the State of either religious conviction or religious observance. He worked a reformation in his tools, too, the law language, with its "saids" and "aforesaids" and its endless tautologies and repetitions. He himself gives a very fair resumé of the most important of the legislative reforms he introduced in Virginia, and with accustomed self-abnegation and lack of desire to glorify self, never once mentioning that he - the youngest of them was chairman of the committee composed of himself, Edmund Pendleton, George Wythe, George Mason and Thomas Lightfoot Lee, and that upon him as chairman fell the main burden of the work. The fact is that he and George Wythe substantially did it all. Mr. Pendleton's part was recast and reformed by the two, owing partially to the fact that Mr. Pendleton misunderstood the program, and still more, perhaps, to the fact that he was called away by sickness.

Randall calls attention to the fact that many, actuated by the undying class hatred of Jefferson and the chronic desire to cheapen him in the public estimate, afterwards were heard to say, that "that part of the revision performed by Pendleton could be distinguished by its superior precision." The humor of this lies in the fact that Pendleton did not perform any part of the revision.

In the distribution made of the work, all of the common law and the British statutes down to the fourth year of James I (1607) - the year of the settlement of Jamestown - -including all the subjects I have mentioned, were committed to Mr. Jefferson alone. The brevity and conciseness and succinctness, as well as the clearness of expression of this codification, is remarkable. The whole thing occupied only ninety folio pages. Much of what was contained in the report of recodification was not enacted until later, but that was the size of it, if it had all been enacted at once. Some parts of it, notably the abolition of slavery and some features of the slave code, were never enacted at all, and of his superb educational code, establishing a complete system from the A B Cs to the crowning result in a State University, only the elementary school part of the last chapter was then actually transferred to the statute books, and it so amended as to mar its working for years. The criminal code, as reported by Mr. Jefferson, entitled, "A bill for proportioning crimes and punishments in cases heretofore capital," etc., occupied only six pages octavo, or, with all the copious notes and references and the embodiment of the AngloSaxon laws, written in that language and accompanied by his own translation, took up only thirteen pages.

The following language in the preamble of Mr. Jefferson's bill "for proportioning crimes and punishments heretofore capital" is characteristic of the man and of his legal style:

"And forasmuch as the experience of all ages and countries hath shown, that cruel and sanguinary laws defeat their own purpose, by engaging the benevolence of mankind to withhold prose

cutions, to smother testimony, or to listen to it with bias, when, if the punishment were only proportioned to the injury, men would feel it their inclination, as well as their duty, to see the laws observed. For rendering crimes and punishments, therefore, more proportionate to each other, Be it enacted by the General Assembly, that no crimes shall be henceforth punished by deprivation of life or limb, except those hereinafter ordained to be so punished."

Jefferson places the defence of capital punishment upon the only sensible ground that it can rest on, if on any, to wit: that certain criminals are capitally punished for the reason that their existence has become inconsistent with the safety of society. There is no defence for capital punishment on the ground that it reforms. There is little on the ground that it deters others. It is very doubtful if it does. But there is such a thing as a criminal, whose very existence and the propagation of whose kind are inconsistent with the welfare of society. In the Code of Virginia, as he revised it, there was to be no conviction for treason, except upon an overt act.

All this might well be called "The Jefferson Code." I know of no higher tribute to him as a successful legislator than the following, which I shall quote from Mr. Kean's book, "Thomas Jefferson as a Legislator." He says:

"Some of the changes were so radical, so novel in the experience of mankind, so far reaching in their effects upon society, so difficult to embody in statutes at once concise, simple and clear, that only those who have had experience either in drafting important laws, or in watching the effects in their administration of important statutory changes, can realize the difficulty of the undertaking and the marvellous skill and foresight with which Mr. Jefferson wrought as a legislator. As an illustration of this, it is worth while, even

to readers who have no acquaintance with technical law, to consider the Virginia 'statute of descents.' This bill became a law in October, 1785. . . . These rules are (briefly stated) the common law 'canons of descent,' by which English inheritances were governed, and largely are still.

...

"Now, by Mr. Jefferson's act in Virginia, every one of them at one stroke was swept away. The estate was required to pass in parcenary (that is, in equal shares where a class of heirs come in), first, to the children and their descendants. This rooted up both the preference of males over females and of the oldest male over the other children of both sexes. If there be no child nor the descendant of any, to the father, and if no father, to the mother, brothers and sisters and their descendants. If these all be wanting, the estate is divided into two moieties, one going to the paternal and the other to the maternal kindred," etc.

"Thus every shred of pre-existing (English) law of descents was demolished, and a scheme based on new principles, contradictory to it, was substituted in its place. The act as adopted (and it was adopted precisely as Mr. Jefferson drew it), consists of eighteen clauses and occupies a little over a single page in the Statute Book."

"Now it has not been without definite purpose that so much of the substance of the act has been stated, even at the peril of disgusting the lay-reader. It was needful to illustrate what now follows. Under the provisions of this new act, which subverted and reversed all the rules which had previously existed in the State, all the real estate which has descended in Virginia to the heirs of the generations of a hundred years, has passed to those entitled by these provisions. So precise, so comprehensive and exhaustive, so simple and clear, were the terms in which they were expressed, that in the experience of a completed century but one single doubt as to the construction and effect of any part of it has arisen. That single doubt was resolved by the case of Davis vs. Rowe, 6 Randolph, 355."

Mr. Kean says that as one consequence of the wonderful fairness and clearness of Mr. Jefferson's "statute of descents": "It is much less the rule for persons (in

Virginia) to make wills, than (as I believe) is the case generally elsewhere." "It is a common remark of men, in whose families no special cause for special provision in case of death exists, that" "the law makes as good a will as they care to have."

Most of these reforms in the direction of adapting laws to republican and democratic institutions were followed, more or less awkwardly, by the other states, though some of the abuses that were abolished in Virginia lingered for years in some of the other states. Jefferson's purpose in abolishing entail and primogeniture is beautifully expressed by him:

"To annul this privilege, and, instead of an aristocracy of wealth, of more harm and danger than benefit to society, to make an opening for the aristocracy of virtue and talent, which nature has wisely provided for the direction of the interests of society, and scattered with equal hand through all its conditions, was deemed essential to a well ordered republic."

Jefferson sought to democratize not only political and social, but industrial conditions. He wanted free labor, as much as free worship, or free land, or equal justice or equality in the family and among citizens. Thus it came about that slavery was not compatible with his doctrine. Throughout his entire life he was consistently and persistently opposed to it. It crops out in his "Summary View of the Rights of British America," published in 1775, in his "Notes on Virginia,' again in the arraignment of the King for encouraging the slave trade in the Declaration of Independence, as originally drawn by him, and still again in the Declaration, in that assertion-which escaped contemporaneous opposition, because it was regarded by super