Therefore it was an appropriate rounding out of his bequest to posterity that he should give his last years to founding the University of Virginia. It was the old workman's last job and one of his best. Had he done for mankind nothing more his name would have won honorable mention among those who have benefited the human race. What a chapter of heroic endeavor and success it is! The aged, feeble, debt-ridden man giving a thousand dollars, giving all of his influence, experience, and genius, using every act of diplomacy with factions, unwilling legislatures, smoothing the sharp corners of local prejudice and sectarian jealousy; giving his thought, time, and labor to every detail of the building and equipment; laboring to overcome inertia, ignorance, crass stupidity; submitting to many slights, snubs, rebuffs, rebukes, misrepresentations, but holding on steadily year by year until at last the institution is there, soaring above all obstacles and opposition, a fixed fact, a glorious fact, a splendid final triumph to this grand old warrior in the battles of human progress. It was the first thoroughly modern school in America. This Benjamin of his old age-his university— came near being wrecked by his own nephew, a boy whom he had been steeping in sage counsels for ten years. A mutinous spirit grew among the students until at length discipline was at an end and riot took the place of order. The faculty was helpless. Jefferson and Madison hurried to the scene, spoke to the students with all the earnestness such a crisis aroused in these aged ex-Presidents, and succeeded in quelling the disturbance. When Mr. Jefferson discovered that his own nephew had come so near ruining the institution which had cost him so much, and upon which his hopes were so fondly fixed, his anger was great and his words harsh. This nephew and other ringleaders were expelled. CHAPTER L POLITICAL OPINIONS IN the author's Napoleon an account is given of the royalist reaction which followed Waterloo. It is there shown how the Kings first used the people against the great Emperor, and then reensnared, reenslaved the credulous people. In Spain, Italy, and Germany the uprising against Napoleon had been made a popular movement by promises of constitutions and democratic institutions. The tyrant once down and securely caged at St. Helena, the people were fettered hand and foot, tongue and brain. The Church, the State, the priest, the soldier, the dungeon, the rack, political and religious persecution in their full ferocity, fell upon the masses and crushed every effort at reform. As Dr. Charles B. Spahr has shown in his Present Distribution of Wealth, it was during the long Napoleonic struggle that the little band of English aristocrats gathered up four-fifths of the real estate in Great Britain-a process which explains why the landlords were opposed to peace. The anti-democratic league of European kings became known as the Holy Alliance. It became their sacred mission on earth to put down every kind of popular movement and to reestablish the good old absolutism of Church and State. Having crushed, brutally and bloodily, every effort of the people to resist them in the Old World, their eyes turned to the New. The South American colonies of Spain had taken advantage of the opportunities Napoleon gave them to throw off the Bourbon yoke. They had struck for independence as we had done. The Holy Alliance determined to drive back these South American republics into the clutches of Spain. For commercial and political reasons, Great Britain did not favor this design of the Holy Alliance, and proposed to us a joint resistance to it. James Monroe was President, and the impor tant issues involved prompted him to seek advice from abler men than himself. He turned to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. The year was 1823, the sage of Monticello was eighty years old, and yet his letter to James Monroe rings like a battle-ax on the iron casque of a foe. The old-time fire was not quenched nor the zeal abated. Listen to the grand old man: "The question presented by the letters you have sent me is the most momentous which has been offered to my contemplation since the Declaration of Independence. That made us a nation; this sets our compass and points the course which we are to steer through the ocean of time. Our first and fundamental maxim should be never to entangle ourselves in the broils of Europe. Our second, never to suffer Europe to intermeddle with cis-Atlantic affairs. "America, North and South, has interests distinct from those of Europe. She should therefore have a system of her own. "While Europe is laboring to become the domicile of despotism, our endeavor should surely be to make our hemisphere the domicile of freedom." He proceeds to argue in favor of the English alliance for the purpose proposed. He also states that the United States ought to acquire Cuba. But waiving that for the time, he declares that a declaration should be issued to the effect that we would oppose with all our means, the forcible interposition of any other power, as auxiliary, stipendiary, or under any other form or pretext, and more espe cially their transfer to any other power by conquest cession or acquisition in any other way." The letter bears date October 24, 1823, and is the first full and explicit setting forth of the Monroe doctrine. Afterward, in Monroe's Cabinet, John Quincy Adams, as the historian |