tainly hardly encourages men in public life to be scrupulously upright. Callender immedi ately allied himself with the editorial staff of the Richmond "Recorder," and filled that paper, day after day, with countless storiespartly his own, partly contributed by others - derogatory to Jefferson. The sheet, hitherto a petty local publication, quickly found its way to the remotest corners of the country; for Callender's characteristic onslaught was of the most ignoble, but certainly of the most effective, kind. He charged Jefferson with having been his friend and financial assistant, and his confederate in the libels upon Washington; but his chief topic was Jefferson's private life, and his many tales were scandalous and revolting to the last degree. Naturally these slanders will not bear repetition here; for they were worse than mere charges of simple amours. Apart from the fact that no decent man would have wished to dip his hands in such filth, one would think that the transaction which had instigated Callender to this conduct would have induced any Federalist editor of moderately good feeling to discountenance so base a revenge. At least these gentlemen might have remembered that they had lately stigmatized Callender as a low and untrustworthy liar, when Hamilton and Washington had been his vic

The

tims. But, to the discredit of the journalists of that period, it must be confessed that their conduct was contrary both to gratitude and to decency. Every Federalist writer hastened to draw for his own use bucketful after bucketful from Callender's foul reservoir, and the gossip about Jefferson's graceless debaucheries was sent into every household in the United States. Jefferson never undertook to deny any of these narratives; and Federalist historians, from whom a fairer judgment might have been expected, have seen fit to treat this silence as evidence of guilt. Obviously it was not so. President of the United States could hardly stoop to give the lie to a fellow like Callender, especially in such a department of calumny. It would be pleasanter for us also to have ignored the matter; but this was scarcely possible, since the charges gravely affected Jefferson's happiness and reputation at the time, and have ever since been repeated to his discredit by writers upon that period. He will probably always be thought of as a man who carried licentiousness far beyond the limit which a grateful nation has tried hard to condone in the cases of Franklin, Hamilton, and many another among the sages and patriots even of those virtuous and simple days. Nevertheless there is no sufficient and unquestionable proof that Jefferson was one

whit worse than the majority of his compeers. Nor is it probable that any one would ever have thought him so if he could have brought himself to make a political removal and appointment such as in these days would be regarded as matter of course.

CHAPTER XIV.

PRESIDENT: FIRST TERM.

LOUISIANA.

JEFFERSON had a fair measure of respect for the Constitution, - perhaps a little more than is ordinarily felt towards a common statute. He was far from regarding it with a blind homage, as if it were the sacred principle of the national life. This was not alone attributable to the facts that tradition had not yet lent to it a sort of consecration, and that prosperity beneath it had not endured long enough to give it a reputation; the feeling was more largely due to Jefferson's abstract views concerning government. A constitution might too often have the effect of fetters upon the nation. The will of the people, which had made the Constitution, might at any time modify or abrogate it. That will ought to be the ultimate rule of decision in any matter sufficiently momentous to justify an appeal to it. Therefore, if the will of the people was with him in an unconstitutional policy which he believed to be sound, Jefferson did not hesitate to speak respectfully of the Constitution, and to disregard it. Per

haps he is the only President of the United States who has ever avowedly and with premeditation carried through an important extraconstitutional measure, relying for justification simply upon the wisdom of the act and the wish of the nation. Such was the real character of his purchase of Louisiana.

From the first moment, many years before the time with which we are now dealing, when his attention had been called to the rights of the United States concerning the Mississippi River, Jefferson had been fully alive to their vast importance. Indeed his estimate of the probable traffic upon that stream, and the consequent growth of New Orleans as a commercial metropolis, has since appeared exaggerated, at least in comparison with the proportionate growth of the rest of the country. In the summer of 1790 a rupture between England and Spain seemed imminent, and Jefferson promptly made ready to seize the opportune moment for compelling a settlement of the open question of navigation. Spain owned both sides of the mouth of the river; but the United States had always asserted that this ownership gave the Spaniards no right to close the stream to the free passage of American vessels. In August, 1790, Jefferson, being then Secretary of State, wrote a vigorous letter to Carmichael, the rep