characters, and whose sentiments on the subject of slavery are unequivocal.
So much for the direct influences on Jefferson's early culture.
Studying, next, the indirect influences on his early culture, we see that the reform literature of that time was coming almost entirely from France. Active, earnest men everywhere were grasping the theories and phrases of Voltaire and Rousseau and Montesquieu, to wield them against every tyranny. Terrible weapons these,—often searing and scarring frightfully those who brandished them,—yet there was not one chance in a thousand that any man who had once made any considerable number of these ideas his won could ever support slavery. Whoever, at that time, studied the "Contract Social," or the defence of Jean Calas, whatever other sins he might commit, was no more likely to advocate systematic oppression than are they who now read with reverence Dr. Arnold and Charles Kingsley; and whoever, at that time, read earnestly "The Spirit of the Laws" was as sure to fight slavery as any man who to-day reveres Channing or Theodore Parker. Those French thinkers threw such heat and light into Jefferson's young mind, that every filthy weed of tyrannic quibble or pro-slavery paradox must have been shrivelled.
And the young statesman grew under this influence as we should expect. In his twenty-seventh year he sat in the Virginia House of Burgesses, and his first effort in legislation was, in his own words, "an effort for the permission of the emancipation of slaves, which was rejected, and, indeed, during the regal government nothing liberal could expect success." His whole career in those years, whether as public man or private man, shows that his hatred of slavery was bitter. But there was such a press of other work during this founding period, that this hatred took shape not so much in a steady siege as in a series of pitched battles. The work to be done was immense, and Jefferson bore the bulk of it. He took upon himself one-third of the revising and codifying of the Virginia laws, and did even more than this. He undertook, in his own words, "a distinct series of labors which formed a system by which every fibre would be eradicated of ancient or future aristocracy." He effected the repeal of the laws of entail, and this prevented an aristocratic absorption of the soil; he effected the abolition of primogeniture, and this destroyed all chance of rebuilding feudal families; he effected a restoration of the rights of conscience, and this overthrew all hope of an Established Church; he forced on the bill for general education,—for thus, he said, would the people be "qualified to understand their rights, to maintain them, and to exercise with intelligence their parts in self government." In all this work his keen common sense always cut his way through questions at which other men stopped or stumbled. Thus, in the discussion on primogeniture, when Isaac Pendleton proposed, as a compromise, that they should adopt the Hebrew principle and give a double portion to the eldest son, Jefferson cut at once into the heart of the question. As he himself relates,—"I observed, that, if the eldest son could eat twice as much, or do double work, it might be a natural evidence of his right to a double portion; but being on a par in his powers and wants with his brothers and sisters, he should be on a par also in the partition of the patrimony. And such was the decision of the other members.
But such fierceness against the bulwarks of aristocracy, and such keenness in cutting through its heavy arguments, carried him farther. Logic forced him to pass from the attack on aristocracy to the attack on slavery, just as logic forces the Confederate oligarchs of to-day to pass from the defence of slavery to the defence of aristocracy. He was sure to fight this vilest of tyrannies, and he gave quick thrusts and heavy blows. In 1778 he brought in a bill to prevent the further importation of slaves in Virginia. "This," he says, "passed without oppo-
