Jefferson professed great faith in human nature; but he meant the human nature of the uneducated and the poor. Kings, rulers, nobles, rich persons, and generally all of the party opposed to him, were hopelessly wrong. The errors of the people, when they committed any, were accidental and momentary; but in the other class, they were proofs of an ineradicable perversity. His faith in human reason as the only power for good government must have been shaken by the students of his university in Virginia. Their lawless conduct seemed to indicate that the time had hardly yet come when the old and vulgar method of authority and force could be dispensed with. The University of Virginia was a favorite project of Jefferson and an honorable memorial of his love of education and of letters. Although it may be considered a failure, it has failed from no fault of his. But we may judge of the real extent of Jefferson's toleration, when we read in a letter written about this university: 'In the selection of our law professor we must be rigorously attentive to his political principles.'
It is easy to know what would be Jefferson's position if by some miracle of nature he were living in these times. If at the South, he would be a man of brave words--showing it to be a natural right of the white man to own and to chastise his negro--and proving, from elementary principles, that slavery is the result of the supremacy of reason and the corner stone of civilized society. Had the advantages of the North led him to desert Monticello for the banks of the Hudson, he would have opposed the Administration, acting and talking much like a certain high official, 'letting I dare not wait upon I would'--for Jefferson was not a bold man, was master of the art of insinuating his opinions instead of stating them manfully, and never advanced so far as to make retreat impossible.
The truth is that there was nothing great nor even imposing in Jefferson's mental nor in his moral qualities. He expressed himself well in conversation and on paper, although a little pedagogical in manner, and too much given to epithet in style. The literary claims of the author of the Declaration of Independence cannot be passed over lightly. His mind was active; catching quickly the outlines of a subject, he jumped at the conclusion which pleased his fancy, without looking beneath the surface.[B] He was curious in all matters of art, literature, and science, but his curiosity was easily appeased. He raves about Ossian, gazes for hours on the Maison Carrée at Nismes, writes letters to Paine on arcs and catenaries, busies himself with vocabularies, natural history, geology, discourses magisterially about Newton and Lavoisier, and studies nothing thoroughly. One can see by the way in which he handles his technical terms that he does not know the use of them. He was a smatterer of that most dangerous kind, who feel certain they have arrived at truth. Like so many other children of the eighteenth century, he rejected the past with disdain, but was blindly credulous of the future; and was ready to embrace an absurdity if it came in a new and scientific shape. The marquises and abbés he met in France had dreamed over elementary principles of society and government, until they had lost themselves in wandering mazes like Milton's speculative and erring angels. He believed that those gay _philosophes_ had discovered the magical stone of social science, and that misery and sin would be transmuted into virtue and happiness. It was only necessary to kill all the kings and to confide in the reason and virtue of the people, and the thing was done. The scenes of 1789 stimulated Jefferson's natural tendency beyond the bounds of common sense. He asserted that Indians without a government were better off than Europeans with one, and that half the world a desert with only an Adam and Eve left in each country to repopulate it would be an improvement in the condition of Europe. He became a bigot of liberalism. Luckily he had his American blood and practical education to restrain him, or he might have been as foolish as Brissot and as rabid as Marat. As it was, he could not help perceiving in his calmer moments that this new path to the glorious future which the _philosophes_ were pointing out to their countrymen, had been for many years in America the well-worn high road of the nation.