Whatever may be the shortcomings of this political philosophy, it was distinctly an American doctrine; one cannot imagine it to have originated in any European country, for what would have been a Utopian and chimerical dream in the Old World was within the reach of man in America. Whether it corresponds to present conditions is still another question; it is nevertheless true that by emphasizing the uniqueness of America and the political superiority of his native land for more than fifty years, Thomas Jefferson did more than any other man of his generation to formulate the creed of Americanism. The man who was accused of being denationalized stands as the most integrally and truly American among his contemporaries.
This does not mean, however, that Jefferson did not occasionally depart from the policies he had thus drawn. No man can remain in public life for half a century without ever falling into contradictions and inconsistencies. Only "closet politicians" and mere theorists never accept any compromise, and Jefferson was a very practical politician with a keen sense of possibilities and realities. Trained as a small-town lawyer, then placed on many committees in Congress, forced to wrest war measures out of a reluctant Assembly, even managing to hold his own with the resourceful diplomats of Europe, Thomas Jefferson knew how to handle men and how "to take things by their smooth handle." There was nothing quixotic about him and he never tried to fight against windmills, nor did he break his head against blank walls. But he was singularly apt to bide his time, to wait for a favorable opportunity and, whenever he saw a chance, he never failed to come back to his original line of conduct and to his original policies.
He seldom indulged in undue display of emotions and personal feelings, but he was no mere thinking machine. In his youth he loved and suffered; later he was perplexed by the riddle of the world; he studied the old philosophers in order to find the moral props which religion could no longer give him and, in his older age, came back to the morals of Jesus. His encyclopedic curiosity and the versatility of his mind won for him the admiration of his contemporaries, and, in that sense--the eighteenth-century sense--he was truly "a philosopher." But he was too practical-minded to waste much time in mere theorizing or in theological and metaphysical "disquisitions." Firmly convinced that the business of life was with matter, he considered science as an instrument and a tool to master the blind forces of nature. He was more interested in applications than in disinterested research, and in that respect, as in many others, he was not only an American, but, above all, an eighteenth-century man. Intensely nationalistic as he was when it came to politics, he was truly cosmopolitan in the realm of intellectual achievements, and thus was created the legend of a denationalized Jefferson; for the popular mind, fond of generalizations, is unable to recognize such distinctions. Among his friends he counted all the leading scientists of the time and through them--particularly through his French friends of the Museum--he exerted an influence of which he himself was perhaps not fully aware. To his European correspondents he appeared the embodiment of what was best in the American character. His influence on the development of liberalism and democratic ideas throughout the world can hardly be estimated, and separate investigations will have to be carried out before his exact contribution to the growth of democracy can be rightly estimated. Through his letters he encouraged his friends to keep their faith, but better still he demonstrated that self-government and democracy, as he understood it, were practical and workable schemes and not the idle dreams of philosophers shut in their closets.