The Writings of Thomas Jefferson | Page 5

of government was the question whether democratic rule could be so organized and conducted that it would not degenerate into license and result in the tyranny of absolutism, without saving to the people the power so often found necessary of representing or destroying their enemy, when he was found in the person of a single despot."
In this excerpt the true democratic principles upon which the American Republic was founded, and which principles were largely conceived and put in shape by Thomas Jefferson, are clearly and concisely set forth. De Tocqueville, born and reared amid monarchial surroundings, though brilliant and learned as he was, could not measure the depths to which Jefferson had dug into the labyrinths of free thought and free institutions, and the consequence was that all of his conjectures as to the life and perpetuity of a government based upon the will and wishes of its subjects could not endure, went for naught, and subjected him to a just criticism not only by the advocates of such a government, but by the government itself. Daniel Webster in the Senate of the United States, while defending the doctrines of universal liberty, for which the State of Massachusetts had always stood, in his great speech in reply to Senator Hayne, of South Carolina, exclaimed in stentorian voice, "I shall enter on no encomium upon Massachusetts; she needs none. There she is. Behold her and judge for yourself. There is her history; the inhabitants know it by heart." So we can say to De Tocqueville, who had said of the Government of the United States, that it is all sail and no ballast, and that it possessed no power to resist internal strife, and, therefore, could not endure: there she is; she needs no encomium by us; there she stands, and she has stood firmly in the face of all sorts of opposition for more than a hundred years, and we believe she will endure forever!
In close relationship to that reign of democratic government which Jefferson so earnestly sought to establish, lies, in open view, the necessity for the education of the people, and to its accomplishment he dedicated, in early life, his talents and his energies. He saw then, and we, at this later period of our national growth and development, realize it all the more, that the strength and perpetuity of all free governments rest mainly upon the education of their subjects. Without it such governments fall easy victims to ignorant military captains and civil demagogues of low repute. Free government is better than monarchy in proportion to the intelligence of the governed. Where every citizen has by systematic training been rooted and grounded in the fruitful soil of knowledge, the principles and practices of self-restraint, and the generous ways of freedom, his loyalty to country cannot easily be shaken, nor can he easily be drawn into hostile schemes against the government that protects him. Jefferson saw clearly the necessity of a general system of education, and was among the very first to move in the direction of its establishment. He was so earnest an advocate of the necessity for and the advantages of education, that he never relaxed his efforts, although vigorously opposed by many of his able associates, until he established the University of Virginia to be finally supported by the State, as an open forum for the education of the young men of the Commonwealth; and his biographers inform us that he regarded this the most important achievement of his great career. In fact, he esteemed this victory so highly that he directed the words to be placed upon his tombstone at Monticello--"Founder of the University of Virginia." No act of his revealed more fully than this the tactician and the statesman, and no single act of his, although his entire career was strewn with great deeds, did so much to usher in a golden era of humanity and an universal monarchy of man, which, under God, is coming by and by.
Jefferson began public life early. Shortly after his graduation from William and Mary's College, the oldest educational institution in Virginia, he took up the study of law, and within a very few years he had gathered about him a profitable clientage. In this, the foremost of the learned professions, his genius as a tactician was early displayed. On account of his comparative youthfulness and the limited time that he had been at the bar, he could not, in the nature of things, have been an erudite lawyer, and yet the registry of the courts before which he practised showed that in the fourth year, after he became a barrister, he was employed in four hundred and thirty important cases. No one but a tactful man, however great his learning, in so short a period of