In spite of Mr. Jefferson's positive statement that he "never took up" his violin after the Revolution broke out, Mr. Randall carries him on to the accident in France, but positively puts an end to it then. In defiance of both Jefferson and Randall, Mr. William Eleroy Curtis keeps Jefferson fiddling with his stiff wrist all through his term of Secretary of State, and holds him to it even while he is President.

A most remarkable composer of true biographies is Mr. Curtis, to be sure!

Perhaps it was while Jefferson was playing with a stiff wrist that he made the reputation which Mr. Curtis said he had-of being the sorriest fiddler in Virginia.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

THE learned Parisian doctors advised the sufferer to drink the waters of Aix. Mr. Jefferson was himself something of a surgeon-could set a broken limb and tie up an artery-and we can not but think he wished to travel for the sake of traveling, else he would not have gone to such a distance to drink water for a bruised wrist.

Whatever his motive, he set forth upon his travels, drank water at Aix for a while, derived no benefit therefrom, and resumed his light wines as he continued his journey. The diary in which he recorded his experience indicates that he was not one of those who go about merely to look at houses and trees, rivers and mountains. He studied the people. He wanted to know how they lived, what kind of food they ate, and beds they slept on; what sort of work was done, and what wages were paid. He entered their homes, lolled upon their cots, peeped into their pots, pried with tongue and spied with eye, in the most practical, prosaic, uncomfortable manner.

Delighted with his success, he wrote to Lafay

ette that if he really wished to know the condition of his own people, he, the marquis, must do what he, the American minister, was then doing-he must go into the huts of the poor, and see for himself just how they lived.

That the French peasantry were wretchedly poor, degraded, squalid, and ignorant to a shameful degree is true—a truth which is disagreeable to the system of king rule and priest rule which had so long held them in absolute subjection. Mr. Jefferson's opinion was that nineteen million of the twenty million citizens of France were in a worse condition than the most abject victims of poverty in America.1

His sympathy with the downtrodden nineteen millions was profound; his indignation against the one million oppressives was hot and bitter.

No words were strong enough to condemn the heartless rulers who had enslaved and brutalized the masses in order that the privileged few might revel in riches beyond the limits of healthy, rational desire.

To Washington, Monroe, and others he wrote in most contemptuous terms of the besotted kings, the reckless, selfish nobles, the cruel inequalities and injustice of the Old World system; but his tone is always that of a statesman deepened in convictions which he had long held.

1 Yet he notes that he had never seen a drunken man in France.

His repeated cry is: "If you want to fully appreciate the blessings of our democracy, come over here and see what the other thing is! Come and gaze upon these swinish Kings, these Queens who madly gamble; these nobles who shirk every duty, plunder the taxpayers, and live riotously on the spoils; these priests who are as greedy as the peers and as corrupt! Come and gaze upon the toilers of the land, those who feed and clothe and serve their masters, living in huts not fit for horse or cow, keeping body and soul together on food not good enough for a decent dog! Look at their rags, their starved faces and forms! Their minds are blank; they have had no schools. Ignorant, superstitious, well-nigh bestial, they have lost all conception of government, and their religion is a meaningless form. To them, the state means a master they must pay, or be damned here on earth; the Church is a master they must pay, or be damned in hell hereafter. Behold in France the ripened harvest of the system! A dull, coarse-mannered King, whose rapture is to slaughter tame birds and deer; a Queen Queen who is frivolous, headstrong, haughty, and devoted to gambling; a nobility which is rotten to the very core; a Church which crucifies its Saviour every day in the week; a peasantry which has never known a kind word or deed from those who are its self-constituted shepherdsa peasantry which has never known its masters

save in the taxes which plundered and the discriminations which, heavy as a yoke, cut like a lash!"

Washington, pleasantly engaged in rehabilitating Mount Vernon, could not realize what Jefferson witnessed in France. For this reason, as well as others, he could never sympathize with the French Revolution.

In all the earlier stages of that mighty movement Mr. Jefferson was as openly a friend of the reformers as his position allowed.

His mansion was common ground upon which the reform leaders could meet to adjust their differences, and they sometimes embarrassed him by the freedom with which they used it.

The French ministers to whom Jefferson made explanation not only took no offense, but, in effect, expressed the hope that these reformers might continue to have the benefit of Jefferson's wise, conservative advice.

That he was conservative is shown by the plan of compromise between the King and the liberal nobles which he suggested. Let the monarch come forward with a charter in which he should grant liberty of the person, of the conscience, and of the press; trial by jury; a representative legislature, to meet annually and control taxation; and a ministry responsible to the people.

Unfortunately, the King was controlled by a