MONTICELLO, December 10, 1819.
DEAR SIR,—I have to
acknowledge the receipt of your favor of November the 23d. The banks,
bankrupt law, manufactures, Spanish treaty, are nothing. These are occurences
which, like waves in a storm, will pass under the ship. But the Missouri
question is a breaker on which we lose the Missouri country by revolt, and what
more, God only knows. From the battle of Bunker's Hill to the treaty of Paris,
we never had so ominous a question. It even damps the joy with which I hear of
your high health, and welcomes to me the consequences of my want of it. I thank
God that I shall not live to witness its issue. Sed hæc hactenus.
I have been amusing
myself latterly with reading the voluminous letters of Cicero. They certainly
breathe the purest effusions of an exalted patriot, while the parricide Cæsar
is lost in odious contrast. When the enthusiasm, however, kindled by Cicero's
pen and principles, subsides into cool reflection, I ask myself, what was that
government which the virtues of Cicero were so zealous to restore, and the
ambition of Cæsar to subvert? And if Cæsar had been as virtuous as he was
daring and sagacious, what could he, even in the plenitude of his usurped
power, have done to lead his fellow citizens into good government? I do not say
to restore it, because they never had it, from the rape of the Sabines to the
ravages of the Cæsars. If their people indeed had been, like ourselves, enlightened,
peaceable, and really free, the answer would be obvious. "Restore
independence to all your foreign conquests, relieve Italy from the government
of the rabble of Rome, consult it as a nation entitled to self-government, and
do its will." But steeped in corruption, vice and venality, as the whole
nation was, (and nobody had done more than Cæsar to corrupt it,) what could
even Cicero, Cato, Brutus have done, had it been referred to them to establish
a good government for their country? They had no ideas of government
themselves, but of their degenerate Senate, nor the people of liberty, but of
the factious opposition of their Tribunes. They had afterwards their Tituses,
their Trajans and Antoninuses, who had the will to make them happy, and the
power to mould their governmant into a good and permanent form. But it would
seem as if they could not see their way clearly to do it. No government can
continue good, but under the control of the people; and their people were so
demoralized and depraved, as to be incapable of exercising a wholesome control.
Their reformation then was to be taken up ab
incunabulis. Their minds were to be informed by education what is right and
what wrong; to be encouraged in habits of virtue, and deterred from those of
vice by the dread of punishments, proportioned indeed, but irremissible; in all
cases, to follow truth as the only safe guide, and to eschew error, which
bewilders us in one false consequence after another, in endless succession.
These are the inculcations necessary to render the people a sure basis for the
structure of order and good government. But this would have been an operation
of a generation or two, at least, within which period would have succeeded many
Neros and Commoduses, who would have quashed the whole process. I confess then,
I can neither see what Cicero, Cato and Brutus, united and uncontrolled, could
have devised to lead their people into good government, nor how this enigma can
be solved, nor how further shown why it has been the fate of that delightful
country never to have known, to this day, and through a course of five and
twenty hundred years, the history of which we possess, one single day of free
and rational government. Your intimacy with their history, ancient, middle and
modern, your familiarity with the improvements in the science of government at
this time, will enable you, if any body, to go back with our principles and
opinions to the times of Cicero, Cato and Brutus, and tell us by what process
these great and virtuous men could have led so unenlightened and vitiated a
people into freedom and good government, et
eris mihi magnus Apollo. Cura ut valeas, et tibi persuadeas carissimum te mihi
esse.
SOURCE: H. A.
Washington, Editor, The Writings of
Thomas Jefferson: Being his Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages,
Addresses, and other Writings, Official and Private, Vol. 7, p. 148-9
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