The Writings of Thomas Jefferson | Page 5

creeds and
established in ordinances sealed with blood, in many great struggles of

the people. They were not new to the people. They were consecrated
theories, but no government had been previously established for the
great purpose of their preservation and enforcement. That which was
experimental in our plan 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