personal insult as much as anything else. Certainly no class enjoying by law special caste privilege, or any class subjected by their situation to such grave temptations, ever behaved so well.

The first sentence of Jefferson's bill "Concerning Slaves" that is, the bill abolishing the importation of slaves into Virginia, was in these words:

"That no persons shall henceforth be slaves within this Commonwealth, except such as were so on the first day of this present session of Assembly, and the descendants of the females of them. Slaves which shall hereafter be brought into this Commonwealth, and kept therein one year, or so long at different times as shall amount to one year, shall be free."

If each State had imitated this statute, slavery must have died out in the border States, and the race problem, even in the cotton States, owing to the consequent comparative paucity in numbers of Africans, would never have been the stupendous thing it now is.

Professor Andrew D. White, "Jefferson and Slavery," in the Atlantic Monthly of January, 1862, says:

"Logic forced him to pass from the attack on aristocracy to the attack on slavery, just as logic forces the Confederate oligarchs of today to pass from the defence of slavery to the defence of aristocracy."

Remember, this was written in 1862, and therefore considering the heated feelings of war times, the son of a Confederate soldier can forgive Professor White for referring to his forefathers as "oligarchs"; which they by no means were. But it is none the less true that the defence of slavery did logically compel to a certain extent the defence of caste, for it was itself a form of

caste and class privilege. But as Thomas Carlyle said: "I thank God men are not logical."

Professor White quotes these utterances from Jefferson, which I shall re-quote. Remember, Jefferson is addressing his brother slaveholders of Virginia:

"When arguing for ourselves, we lay it down as fundamental, that laws, to be just, must give reciprocation of right—that without this, they are mere arbitrary rules of conduct, founded in force, and not in conscience; and it is a problem which I give to the master to solve, whether the religious precepts against the violation of property were not framed for him as well as his slave — and whether the slave may not as justifiably take a little from one who has taken all from him as a man may slay one who would slay him."

"Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure, when we have removed their only firm basis a conviction in the minds of the people that their liberties are the gifts of God, that they are not to be violated but with His wrath? . . . The Almighty has no attribute, which can take side with us in such a contest."

"What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment, and death itself, in vindication of his own liberty, and, in the next moment, be deaf to all those motives whose power supported him through his trial, and inflict on his fellow men a bondage one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose?"

"The hour of emancipation is advancing in the march of time. It will come; and whether brought on by the generous energy of our own minds or by the bloody process of St. Domingo, is a leaf of our history not yet turned over."

If the war had not come, and the slaves been freed as a "war measure," and if there being no power under the Constitution for Congress to interfere with slavery

in the States-slavery had continued for another half century or so, the negro population growing in comparison with the whites, as it did under slavery conditions so favorable to their birth rate and unfavorable to their death rate - would not the scenes of San Domingo have been some day necessarily reenacted in the Southern cotton States?

Jefferson's enduring influence in every word he uttered is shown by the fact that during the War Between the States, Andrew D. White, in this very article, quoted in favor of the abolition of slavery, as a "war measure," what Jefferson said, when Cornwallis had carried his negroes off to die of smallpox and then deserted them stricken and dying: "Had this been to give them their freedom, he would have done right." This is quoted against Jefferson's own kith and kin, against the South that he loved so dearly, against Virginia that he almost worshipped. But it must be confessed that what Jefferson said was a logos, just as is the phrase of the Declaration of Independence, "All men are created equal and endowed," etc. In the latter case, I have no doubt that Jefferson intended it to be as a leaven, and that he saw, long down the aisle of time, the day when that leaven must work.

Jefferson's own words in connection with his desire to procure the emancipation and deportation of slaves, better express his view than any explanation of them:

"It is still in our power to direct the progress of emancipation and deportation, peaceably, and in such slow degree, as that the evil will wear off insensibly, and their place be, pari passu, filled up by free white laborers. If, on the contrary, it is left to force itself on, human nature must shudder at the prospect held up."?

Later, Mr. Jefferson in his "Memoir" uses this language in connection with the same subject:

"But it was found that the public mind would not yet bear the proposition, nor will it bear it even at this day. Yet the day is not distant when it must bear and adopt it, or worse will follow. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion, have drawn indelible lines of distinction between them."

If our Southern ancestry could have "borne" the proposition early enough, what a deluge of blood, what a wealth of women's tears, what devastations of the land, and what waste in treasures had been spared us! And if your Northern forefathers had only remembered the balance of what Jefferson wrote and knew so well, or if they could, in the nature of things, have known it; namely, that the two races cannot live equals politically and socially, in the same government, because "nature, habit and opinion have drawn indelible lines of distinction between them," how much of the criminalities, follies, mad saturnalia and corruption of reconstruction, how much of the great "Fool's Errand," as it is so well designated by one who calls himself "one of the fools," would have been spared us as a nation!

I know of nothing showing the prescient wisdom of one man, more than these few lines just quoted from Mr. Jefferson show his. In this, as in many other instances, it has seemed to me that the man had an intuitive, and not merely a reasoned, insight into the future. What would we not have been by now had we never been cursed with slavery, with the irrepressible, bloody and wasteful conflict growing out of it, and with

the almost unavoidable pendente bello and post bellum federal and industrial consolidation, all leading to the casting off of the ship for so long a time from the old Jeffersonian moorings! It must be confessed that the running together of partisan interest and of slave interest made the party which Jefferson founded to cease for a time to be Jeffersonian - made it a defender of aristocracy, as well as of slavery in the South. It seems restored to its old course again. God grant that the verisimilitude prove a verity!

The plan of emancipation and deportation, which Jefferson drew up intended to be offered as an amendment to the slave code as reported by the law revisers, contemplated not only the freedom of all slaves born after a certain date, but their apprenticeship to some trade, until reaching a certain age, and then their deportation to some territory to be bought for them, and an advancement of tools of husbandry and of provisions sufficient for them to support themselves, until a crop had been made on land given them.

Lincoln, like Jefferson, recognized inherent differences between the two races, and regarded the blacks as essentially inferior. In other words, neither was ever free of that which most people call "race prejudice," but which I think ought to be called "race knowledge."

It will be remembered that when Jefferson resigned from the Continental Congress to go to Virginia in order to make sure of democratic reforms, one reason he gave for undertaking it at that time was this: "The shackles which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war will remain on us long, will be made