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a state and liberties of the people" requires of the "state to interpose its authority for their protection in the manner best calculated to secure that end" and "states which have no common umpire must be their own judges and execute their own designs." This is in part the very language and in entirety the substance of the Kentucky resolutions. The federalist governors and legislatures of the New England states shrank in horror from these resolutions in 1798, but in 1814, when the embargo affected the commercial interests of the New England states, as the alien and sedition laws threatened the liberties of the whole people without regard to locality, they faced about and adopted the very blasphemy at which they had held up their hands so little a time before.

In 1851, after Mr. Webster had sifted these questions with Hayne and Calhoun, he said: "How absurd it is to suppose that when different parties enter into a compact for certain purposes either can disregard any one provision and expect nevertheless the other to observe the rest. * * A bargain cannot be broken on one side and still bind the other side." He was discussing "the union of the states" and the preservation of that union by due observance of the fugitive slave clause of the constitution. In 1848 Mr. Lincoln said in congress: "Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and form a new one that suits them better. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can may revolutionize."

Lincoln, of course, was here speaking of the right of revolution. But it does not matter whether secession is accomplished as a compact right or as a revolutionary right so long as it is a right and not a wrong. The compact right is not needed and need not be expressed if the right exists as a revolutionary right. These principles are old and familiar. But it is to be hoped that for all time to come that questions will be settled in the forum and with the ballot. The world has seen enough of force, whether used to suppress or to liberate. The new order of things demands that peace and reason shall prevail. It recognizes human life as sacred. It even looks upon revolution as a doubtful expedient. It therefore reverts to Jefferson's words in the declaration of independence, which caution against revolution for transient causes. Revolution is generally physical force. The triumph of reason ought to and perhaps already has supplanted both.

But enough authority is cited to show that Jefferson did not stand alone in his theories of government, and that he was not a dark and treacherous influence against which all the powers of light were contending. It is a species of childish casuistry to single him out as the author of the nation's woes. This is not the philosophic view of history. Acts and not writings produce revolutions. Men are too taken up with the affairs of their own lives to forsake them under the influence of abstract doctrines. Men react because they are acted upon, and not otherwise.

Happily the question has been settled and no one wants to reopen it. This united republic, if it remains a republic, has a destiny before it immeasurably great

er than if the union had been divided. But whether it could be divided and whether laws could be nullified were questions of construction upon which men differed in the early days of the republic and differed frequently upon interest. When states and groups of states north and south at different times subscribed to the principles of the Kentucky resolutions, when Madison, Webster and Lincoln in one form or another advocated them, and when a great majority of the American people elected Jefferson president upon the issue of whether these resolutions were true or false, the denouncement of Jefferson is particular and unjust.

It ill becomes a breed of statesmen who no longer mention the constitution and no longer pretend to observe it to blacken the memory of this great man whose passion for this republic is one of the purest ideals in history and whose defense of the constitution, vigilant and unremitting, rises to the sublimity of heroic legend. Jefferson was a constitutionalist. He believed in the constitution. The party which he founded was and is a constitutional party. Moreover, there has never been any other constitutional party in this country. All other opposing parties, by whatever name they have gone, have done their utmost to undermine the constitution in favor of special privilege, which is the real soul of monarchy.

In Jefferson's day as now public men had to choose between the friendship of monopolists and the friendship of the producers of wealth. Himself of the landed aristocracy of Virginia, his principles were in revolt against special privilege. He doubtless found fewer congenial spirits

among those whose cause he championed than he would have found with the federalists. But he made the sacrifice and laid himself liable to the charge of demagogy, which was common even in his day. The federalists hated Jefferson because he stood in their way. He was against their bank and tariff laws and their monarchial tendencies. He exposed their schemes of consolidation and monopoly. His omnipresent influence, subtle and irresistible, baffled them. His pen was never idle; his activities permeated the land. He gathered together the people whose hearts still vibrated with the thunder of liberty and he overthrew the federalists, horse and rider. He clothed abstract principles of justice and equality in such splendor that the popular mind was won from the seductions of power and glory. The federalists found that they were not for America nor America for them. After an interregnum of monarchial drift America resumed its character and destiny. Jefferson as president righted the course of the republic. He became its tutor and trained it so thoroughly that the federalists took to cover. When they emerged it was with a new party, which bore the standard of moral principles triumphant at last by the living influence of him whose memory they abhorred.

Jefferson was at the head of and produced the classical school of American presidents. His principles embellished and strengthened the faculties of men who would have been mediocre without them. He gave form and purpose to the republic. His political canons became law. Madison and Monroe followed in his footsteps. Jackson and Van Buren learned the lesson

of government from him. He was the political father of Lincoln. The speeches of every great statesman of this land are saturated with his principles. He set loose a current of liberty which flows around the world today and rocks upon its bosom the toy flotilla of imperialism. The breakers and the depths await it.

Such was the man Jefferson, who thought so little of the office of president that he did not mention it among his achievements. He wanted to be remembered as the author of the declaration of independence, the statute of Virginia for religious freedom and father of the University of Virginia. His long life was spent in the cause of liberty; in disseminating knowledge; in promoting the sciences; in lifting up the weak; in making the world fitter to live in; in constructing for the future. Who disputes his philosophy? Who says that all should not be equal before the law? Who says that men do not have the inalienable rights of life and liberty, that the office of government is to secure these and that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed?

His enemies in despair have tortured his kindness into cowardice, his love for humanity into a sordid desire to use the mob. They have called him a shifty doctrinaire. The word means little. But his influence was not bourgeois. He saw the new day; he turned his back on the past. He followed his conscience and the light of his mind to the utmost limits. There was no remnant of monarchy in any of his practices or principles. He is, therefore, in America at least, the one perfect prophet of the future.

Almost to the last day of his life his mind hungered

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