From 1776 to 1817, look where you will in the public affairs of the United States, you find this little man doing, or helping to do, or trying to get a chance to do, the thing that most wanted doing. He was the willing horse who is allowed to draw the load. His heart was in the business of serving his country. He was simply intent on having the right thing done, not to shine in doing it. Among his virtues was his joyous love of a jest, which made him one of the most agreeable of comrades, and preserved his health and spirits to his eighty-fifth year, and lighted up his dying face with smiles. It is a pleasure to me to walk in Madison Square because it bears his name. Of all Jefferson's triumphs, none seems so exceptional as his being able to give to a man so little brilliant and so very useful the conspicuous place he held in the public life of the United States. They met for the first time at this session of the Legislature, and remained friends and political allies for fifty years.

A leader on the conservative side was R. C. Nicholas, for many years the head of the bar in Virginia, a stanch Churchman and gentleman-of-the-old school. But Jefferson feared most the singular, tireless persistence of Edmund Pendleton: a cool, wary, accomplished speaker, he says; "full of resource, never vanquished; for if he lost the main battle, he returned upon you, and regained so much of it as to make it a drawn one, by dexterous manœuvres, skirmishes in detail, and the recovery of small advantages which, little singly, were important all together. You never knew when you were clear of him." Differ as they might, the leaders of the two parties in this House remained excellent friends; the reason being that they were most scrupulously observant of all the forms of courtesy. It was often remarked of Patrick Henry that never, in his most impetuous oratory, was he guilty of personal disrespect to a member of the House. On the contrary, he was profuse in those expressions of regret for being obliged to dif

fer, and of respect for the character of an opponent, which assist so much to make public debate a genuine interchange of thought, and keep it above the contemptible pettiness of personal contention. All the men trained in that old House of Burgesses appear to have caught this spirit. What Jefferson said of Madison's manners in debate describes all of them who are remembered : "Soothing always the feelings of his adversaries by civilities and softness of expression." As to Jefferson himself, not once in his whole public career did he lose or weaken a point by needlessly wounding an opponent's self-love.

In the work of reorganizing Virginia, Jefferson struck first at the system of entail. After a three weeks' struggle, that incubus was lifted. Every acre and every negro in Virginia, by the 1st of November, 1776, was held in fee simple, could be sold for debt, was free to fall into hands that were able to use them. It was the easiest and quickest of his triumphs, though he did not live long enough to outlive the enmity his victory engendered. Some of the old Tories found it in their hearts to exult that he who had disappointed so many fathers, lost his only son before it was a month old; and John Randolph, fiftyfive years after, could still attribute all the evils of Virginia to this triumph of "Jefferson and his levelling system."

He found it easier to set free the estates of his countrymen than their minds. Petitions for the repeal of statutes oppressive of the conscience of dissenters came pouring in upon the Assembly from the first day of the session. These, being referred to committee of the whole, led to the severest and longest struggle of the session. "Desperate contests," as Jefferson records, continued almost daily from the 11th of October to the 5th of December." He desired to sweep away the whole system of restraint and monopoly, and establish perfect liberty of conscience and opinion by a simple enactment of half a dozen lines:

"No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, ministry, or place whatsoever; nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods; nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion; and the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities."

It required more than nine years of effort on the part of Jefferson, Madison, and their liberal friends to bring Virginia to accept this solution of the religious problem, in its simplicity and completeness. All that they could accomplish at this session, after their twenty-five days' debate, was the repeal of the statutes imposing penalties for going to the wrong church, and compelling dissenters to pay tithes. At every subsequent session, for many years, the subject was called up, and, usually, some concession was made to the demands of the liberal party. In 1779, for example, all forced contributions for the support of religion were surrendered. The principle, however, was retained, and, indeed, reasserted, that it was part of the duty of government to regulate religious belief; and the laws remained in force which made it penal to deny the Trinity, and deprived a parent of the custody of his children if he could not subscribe to the leading articles of the Episcopal creed.

We have come now to regard liberty of belief very much as we do liberty of breathing, as a right too natural, too obvious, to be called in question,-forgetting all the ages of effort and of anguish which it cost to rescue the human mind from the domination of its natural foes. These nine years of Virginia debates have perished; but something of their heat and strenuous vigor survive in a passage which Jefferson inserted in his "Notes on Virginia," written toward the end of the Revolutionary War, and circulated in Virginia a year before the final triumph of religious

freedom. The passage is out of place in the work, and it was probably left in, or lugged in, to give aid to Madison in his last contest with the opponents of Jefferson's act. Doubtless it had its influence, coming as it did from a distant land and a name bright with the undimmed lustre of revolutionary successes. Indeed, this vigorous utterance of Thomas Jefferson was the arsenal from which the opponents of the forced support of religion drew their weapons, during the whole period of about fifty years that elapsed between its publication and the repeal of the last State law which taxed a community for the support of the clergy; nor will it cease to have a certain value as long as any man, in any land, is distrusted, or undervalued, or abridged of his natural rights, on account of any opinion whatever.

It is a curiously intense and compact passage, all alive with short, sharp sentences, as if he had struggled to get the whole of the controversy into a few pages. Opinion, he says, is something with which government has nothing to do. "It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." Constraint makes hypocrites, not converts. A government is no more competent to prescribe beliefs than diet or medicine. "It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself. Subject opinion to coercion, and whom will you make your inquisitors? Fallible men, governed by bad passions, by private as well as public

crites; to support roguery and error all over the earth. Let us reflect that it is inhabited by a thousand millions of people; that these profess probably a thousand different systems of religion; that ours is but one of that thousand; that if there be but one right, and ours that one, we should wish to see the nine hundred and ninety-nine wandering sects gathered into the fold of truth. But against such a majority we cannot effect this by force. Reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments. To make way for these, free inquiry must be indulged; and how can we wish others to indulge it, while we refuse it ourselves?"

Fortunately, he was able to allay the fears of those who believed that virtue would cease to prevail if tithes could not be collected by the sheriff, by pointing to Pennsylvania and New York, where there was no established church, and yet no indications of a decay of morals could be discerned. Religion was well supported, and no more malefactors were hanged than in Virginia. Religious dissension was unknown, for the people had made the happy discovery that the way to silence religious disputes was to take no notice of them; and to extinguish religious absurdity, to laugh at it. He urged his countrymen to have the rights of conscience fixed in law before the war ended, while rulers were honest and people united; for, when peace recalled the people to their usual pursuits, he feared it would be difficult to concentrate attention upon a matter of abstract right. "The shackles which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war will remain on us long, will be made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion."

In 1786 the act drawn by Jefferson, entitled by him" An Act for establishing Religious Freedom," became the law of Virginia. The preamble of the act is a forcible statement of the whole argument for freedom of opinion; and, not content with thus fortifying the law, he adds to the act itself a paragraph which, I believe, is unique:

"And though we well know that this Assembly, elected by the people for the ordinary purposes of legislation only, have no power to restrain the acts of succeeding Assemblies, constituted with the power equal to our own, and that, therefore, to declare this act irrevocable would be of no effect in law, yet we are free to declare, and do declare, that the rights hereby asserted are of the natural rights of mankind; and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right."

Never, perhaps, since the earliest historic times, has one mind so incor porated itself with a country's laws and institutions as Jefferson's with those of new-born Virginia. In this first month of October, 1776, besides actually accomplishing much, he cut out work enough to keep the best heads of Virginia busy for ten years. It was he who drew the bill for establishing courts of law in the State, and for defining the powers, jurisdiction, and methods of each of them. It was he who caused the removal of the capital from Williamsburg to Richmond, thus originating the plan, since followed by nearly every State, of fixing the capital near the geographical centre, but remote from the centre of trade, capital, and fashion. It may have been best for Virginia, it was best for Virginia; but it is not yet certain that a policy is sound which caused the city of Washington to come into being, and which has given a fictitious importance to twenty Harrisburgs and Albanys, besides affording to official misconduct the convenient cloak of distance. Little, however, could Jefferson have foreseen the influence of his action when, in the teeth of the old Tory families planted in the ancient capital, he carried the day for the village of Richmond, and served on the committee that laid out its public square, and placed its unfortunate public buildings.

Another bill introduced by him in this most fruitful month has produced consequences far-reaching and momen

tous. It was a bill fixing the terms upon which foreigners should be admitted to citizenship in Virginia: Two years' residence; a declaration of intention to live in the State, and a promise of fidelity to it; minor children of naturalized parents, and minors without parents in the State, to become citizens on coming of age, without any legal formality. The principle of this bill and most of its details have been adopted by the national government. In the light of the experience of eightyfive years, and writing on Manhattan Island, we can still say, that the principle of admitting foreigners to citizenship on easy terms, and after a short residence, has been the vital principle of the country's growth; and that Jefferson's bill lacked but one brief clause to make it as safe as it has been powerful: Provided, That the foreigner aforesaid proves, to the satisfaction of the court, that he can read English well enough to be independent of all other men in acquiring the political information requisite for intelligent voting." Alas! he did not foresee the Manhattan Island of 1871; nor had a mind yet been created capable of conceiving the idea of admitting to the suffrage hordes of ignorant negroes without the least preliminary preparation.

The laws of Virginia were a chaos of obsolete and antiquated enactments, good for lawyers, bad for clients. Jefferson brought in a bill, in October, 1776, proposing that the House name a committee of five, who should get together the whole mass, revise them, and present for the consideration of the House a Body of Law suited to the altered times and circumstances of the State. The bill being passed, the five revisers were elected by ballot, and Jefferson received the highest number of votes; his colleagues being Edmund Pendleton, George Wythe, George Mason, and T. L. Lee. The two last named, not being lawyers, soon withdrew from the commission, leaving the three others to do the work; Jefferson's portion of which occupied the leisure of two years. It was, indeed,

one of the most arduous and difficult labors of his life; for to him was assigned the revision of ancient British law, from the remotest period to the meeting of the first House of Burgesses of Virginia, of which his great-grandfather had been a member, in 1619. Many a long journey it cost these three public-souled gentlemen to get together, in order to discuss principles and compare work; until, in 1779, the revisers were able to present their labors to the Legislature in the convenient form of one hundred and twenty-six bills, to be separately acted upon. These bills were taken up one at a time, as occasion favored or demanded, during the next six or seven years; every enlightened and humane principle or detail having a most persistent and persuasive advocate in James Madison.

Jefferson's part in this revision was most important. The bill for religious freedom, already described, was now completed in the form in which it was finally acted upon in 1786. Against the opposition of Pendleton he carried the extirpation of the principle of primogeniture from the legal system of Virginia. True to his character, Pendleton strove, when the main battle was lost, to save something from the wreck; proposing that the eldest son should, at least, have a double portion. No, said Jefferson; "if the eldest son could eat twice as much, or do double work, it might be a natural evidence of his right to a double portion; but, being on a par in his powers and wants with his brothers and sisters, he should be on a par also in the partition of his patrimony." Against Pendleton, too, Mr. Jefferson prevailed to preserve as much of the letter of ancient law as possible, because the meaning of each word and phrase had been established by judicial decisions. A new code, Mr. Jefferson thought, owing to the imperfection of human language, would "involve us in ages of litigation," until the precise meaning of every word had been settled by decisions and

commentaries. But this did not apply to modern Virginia statutes, which, he thought, should be reduced to the utmost simplicity and directness.

It is pleasing to notice how cordially the revisers labored together, and how entirely they confided in one another, though differing in opinion. Observe this evidence of it in one of Jefferson's later letters: "We found" (on the final revision)" that Mr. Pendleton had not exactly seized the intentions of the committee, which were to reform the language of the Virginia laws and reduce the matter to a simple style and form. He had copied the acts verbatim, only omitting what was disapproved; and some family occurrence calling him indispensably home, he desired Mr. Wythe and myself to make it what we thought it ought to be, and authorized us to report him as concurring in the work."

The bill assigning pains and penalties cost Jefferson much research and thought. The committee swept away at once most of the obsolete cruelties of the ancient code, but some of the revisers were disposed to retain portions of the old system of retaliation : an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a poisoner to die by poison, and a maimer to be maimed. Jefferson objected. The infliction of such penalties, he thought, would "exhibit spectacles "the moral effect of which would not be salutary; particularly (he might have added) in a State where every free fight was expected to end in gouging. This part of the scheme was, at his suggestion, reconsidered; so that no sheriff in Virginia has ever been called upon to pry out an eye or bite off a

nose.

One of Jefferson's substitutions of new sense for ancient folly in the penalties bill was admirable. Instead of the old laws concerning witchcraft, he suggested this: "All attempts to delude the people, or to abuse their understanding by exercise of the pretended arts of witchcraft, conjuration, enchantment, or sorcery, or by pretended prophecies, shall be punished by

ducking and whipping, at the discretion of a jury, not exceeding fifteen stripes." He dropped also the barbarous Jewish penalties for unnatural crimes, on this ground: "Bestiality will ever be properly and severely punished by universal derision." In his preamble to the bill assigning penalties, he asserted doctrines many years in advance of the least monstrous code then existing. At a time when France condemned to death a female servant who stole a spoon, and London saw cartloads of lads drawn to Tyburn for theft, Jefferson began this act by declaring that "cruel and sanguinary laws defeat their own purpose by engaging the benevolence of mankind to withhold prosecution," and that "capital punishments, which exterminate instead of reforming, should be the last melancholy resource against those whose existence has become inconsistent with the safety of their fellow-citizens." In this code, no crimes were capital but murder and treason; and only an overt act was to be accounted

treason.

Of the bills drawn by Jefferson, those upon which he most set his heart failed utterly. Only a commonwealth of Jeffersons, Masons, Madisons, and Wythes could have carried into successful operation that magnificent scheme of universal education, embodied in three of the acts drawn by him. He loved knowledge. He loved literature. Writing to Dr. Priestly, in the midst of one of the political frenzies of a later day, he said: "I thank on my knees Him who directed my early education for having put into my possession this rich source of delight," the ability to read Homer in the original; and, during a similar paroxysm of political fury, he wrote to a neighbor, that if anything could induce him to sleep another night away from home, it would be his solicitude for the education of youth. He felt that a community needs the whole of the superior intelligence produced in it, and that such intelligence is only made available for good purposes by right culture. His