of those for whom and for whose children and for whose children's children he drew up that precious document, to whose fearless enunciation of the primary principles of liberty and freedom we owe that which we cherish as our brightest possession-our independence among the nations of the earth?

When for a moment we pause and recollect the men amongst whom he moved-when we recollect the names of James Madison, Patrick Henry, Nathaniel Macon, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, Lafayette, George Mason, James Otis, Richard Henry Lee, the gallant Marion, as true as the steel of his own sword, James Monroe, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, John Adams, General Gates, with the almost numberless others, great and honest men, of whom any country might have reason to be proud, and rank at their head the greatest name of all, that of George Washington, whose unblenching integrity and never-weakened firmness of purpose rendered him the prime architect of that proud edifice to which each and all of them lent his ready will and helping hand and eager labor, we can not but feel, it was to no common intellect, such a race of men as these committed the task of drawing up and embodying our Declaration of Independence.

Our fathers signed it with their blood. May God avenge it on their children, if they are ever untrue to the great trust that these men bequeathed them.

It

One of the most valuable portions of this work to the student of history, as it must be to the student of the personal character of greatness, is the Auto-Biography of Jefferson, which may be considered, though unfinished, as a model of this class of composition, by every public man who may consider the events with which he has been linked to possess of themselves sufficient public interest to justify him in thus appealing to posterity. His style is scrupulously curt and inornate. dwells upon public events as they were connected with himself, and consequently with the legislative portion of the history of the Revolution, and our primary existence as an independent nation. Consequently, but little is here exhibited by his pen which may attract the attention of the general reader, although much is there that will be gratifying, as well as replete with information to him who will weigh the facts narrated in it by the judgment of one who, in his youth, had borne an active part in them. Nor only so, but in his age, when passion, impulse, and vanity were well-nigh worn out-for this auto-biography was sketched in by Jefferson when the ripeness of his age touched upon his seven and seventieth year-had taken his pen in

his hand to narrate, as barely and succinctly as it was possible, his own share of the great and stirring events in which his youth had borne its part.

"Peter, my father," says Jefferson, "was born February 29, 1707-8, and intermarried 1739 with Jane Randolph, of the age of nineteen, daughter of Isham Randolph, one of the seven sons of that name and family, settled at Dungeoness, in Goochland. They trace their pedigree far back in England and Scotland, to which let every one ascribe the faith and merit he chooses."

Is not the last sentence a key to the whole of the earnest and tried Republicanism of Jefferson's character? Does it not show us how it was, that, from the commencement of the Revolution, he perforce bore such a prominent part in it? Probably, while yet a young man, his valuation of the claims of family and descent may not have been so decidedly low. Nevertheless, the seed of that valuation must have existed in his mind. If it did not grow with his growth, it acquired consistence and strength as the man himself strengthened. Then came the Revolution, and mathematically wrought out for him, that great principle of valuing nothing as the equal of human talent and human integrity, which constituted alike the fundamental basis, whether of his thought or of his action.

So consistently, indeed, did this leading principle bias his life, that, in speaking of the Virginia Legislature, of which he became a member in 1769, he says: "Our minds were circumscribed within narrow limits by an habitual belief that it was our duty to be subordinate to the Mother Country in all matters of government, to direct all our labors in subservience to her interests, and even to observe a bigoted intolerance for all religions but hers. The difficulties with our representatives were of habit and despair, not of reflection and conviction."

If as we believe he did, although this was written later— at the age of twenty-five, he could thus conscientiously discriminate the feelings of others, his mind must early have developed itself, and his impressions could not have been the chance offshoot of the circumstances amongst which he was placed, but the organic and settled development of his own sufficing and vigorous intellect.

From this time, the native powers of his mind and his honest ambition impelled him into a leading position. He entered into the stirring desires that made themselves active in the souls of our sires. He found a voice to shape them with, and was one of the men that gave a bodily evidence of the yet

crude though active wishes of the national existence that was as yet barely struggling in the earliest throes of its being. We therefore find him meeting with Patrick Henry-whom some years earlier, he said, "appeared" to him "to speak as Homer wrote"-Richard Henry Lee, Francis L. Lee, and Mr. Carr, in the spring of 1793, "to consider and consult with them," on the expediency of coming to a positive understanding with all the other colonies as regarded the British claims upon their internal government. This meeting, we believe, led to the institution of a Court of Inquiry held in Rhode-Island. It was organized with the power to send persons to England, to be tried for offenses committed in that colony. Consequently upon the action of these five men in the Virginia Legislature, the Committees of Correspondence were for the first time organized between the various colonies, and a decided step was made toward that union of principle, which subsequently resulted in achieving their independence.

Shortly after his account of this, we light upon a singular phrase, in which he says, having "rummaged over the Revolutionary precedents and forms of the Puritans of '55," they "cooked up a resolution for appointing the 1st day of June, on which the Port-Bill was to commence, as a day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer." It is obvious that, in his mind, the political necessity outweighed the religious formula.

However, be this as it may, the draught of instructions which he had drawn up for the delegates sent to the first Central Congress in Philadelphia, and which was subsequently printed in pamphlet form, under the title of "A Summary View of the Rights of British America," was the first stake he made in public life, which brought him prominently into notice. It was in this draught that he laid down as an obvious and leading principle in that dispute which had already awakened between the Mother Country and her colonies, one broad fact. This was, that the emigration here from England, actually gave her no more right over us than the forays and emigrations of the Danes and Saxons gave to the authorities of their present governments a positive right over England.

To ourselves-educated as we have been in the principles that Jefferson enounced and instilled-this seems so purely a self-evident proposition, that we own we are scarcely able to understand him when he says, in speaking of it, "as yet I had never been able to get any one to agree with me but Mr. Wythe."

In fact, the advance which has been made by our country in

a ripe and earnest Republicanism of feeling has been so decided and striking, that we feel convinced, he would gaze upon and measure its yet advancing progress with a sound and earnest pleasure, were he for a brief period restored to earth.

Our

His was one of the mighty hands that scattered the seed. It has budded, put forth the ear, and ripened. We reap. children and the children of our children shall garner in the harvest.

Gaze, if only for a moment, at the rapid progress in the path of Empire which has been made by the Republic since that period. It has stretched its boundaries abroad with a resolute and vigorous will. It has trodden upon its course, with the power and energy of a young Titan. Travelling down the broad stream of the Mississippi, it has emerged upon the shores of that blue gulf whose waters girdle Cuba. In the grandeur of its youthful strength it has welcomed a still younger Republic,. larger, in truth, than many an European kingdom, to its broad bosom. Stealing across the waters of that gigantic stream, which washes downward through the central portion of this broad continent, it has bound the gold-strewed shores of the far Pacific within the cincture of its own elastic girdle. Tripled and quadrupled, nay, quintupled in its extent, it has at length made itself the dominant power upon the northern half of America. But for the snow-bound and icy regions, whose scanty population lies within the exterior shell of British Canada, it would also be the largest.

To what is it, that primarily we owe this? We owe it to the pure, frank, and Republican spirit of this man and his peers. They were the head as Washington was the hand of that large soul, which has shapen out our Government-the only government at present existing under which a freeman can live. Slight evils there may possibly be, which have gradually crept upon us with our gigantic progression, or which remain from our first foundation as a part and parcel of evil in our own nature. But these evils are far from being of sufficient strength to impair or weaken our genuine Republicanism. We exist as a stronger and more Democratic race than our fathers did, when his sagacity and that of the powerful race of thinkers amongst whom he moved denied the right of a single family to entail its errors and those of its obstinate and plodding will upon us and upon our descendants.

From the moment in which he entered the first Congress of the Colonies, events thronged upon the time.

Every month deepened the bitterness of feeling which ex

isted between the two parties. English misrule gradually widened the breach the resolution of our ancestors rendered ultimately impassable.

One thing is there in this auto-biographical sketch of his public life by Thomas Jefferson, which renders it more than valuable, both to his own reputation and for our study. This, we may be permitted to say, is the frank and honest mode in which he both valued and spoke of the men amongst whom he moved. Written as this sketch was, at an age when he had outlived all his younger jealousies or fiercer impulses, he makes no attempt to pluck for himself any of those honors which belonged to his fellows in the great toil which establishes his right to a permanent and vigorous memory amongst us and our descendants. Hear him, as he speaks of one of his coadjutors at the task which his bold and earnest will had shapen for itself:

"In giving this account of the laws of which I was myself the draughtsman, I by no means mean to claim to myself the merit of obtaining their passage. I had many occasional and strenuous coädjutors in debate, and one, most steadfast, able, and zealous, who was himself a host. This was George Mason, a man of the first order of wisdom among those who acted on the theatre of the Revolution, of expansive mind, profound judgment, cogent in argument, learned in the lore of our former constitution, and earnest for the Republican change on democratic principles. His elocution was neither flowing nor smooth; but his language was strong, his manner most impressive, and strengthened by a dash of biting cynicism, when provocation made it seasonable."

See his acute and reliably powerful valuation of Madison, who came into the House in 1776, "a new member and young:"

Trained in these successive schools, he acquired a habit of self-possession, which placed at ready command the rich resources of his luminous and discriminating mind, and of his extensive information, and rendered him the first of every assembly afterwards, of which he was a member. Never wandering from his subject into vain declamation, but pursuing it closely, in language pure, classical, and copious, soothing always the feelings of his adversaries by civilities and softness of expression, he rose to the eminence which he held in the great National Convention of 1787; and, in that of Virginia which followed, he sustained the new constitution in all its parts against the logic of George Mason, and the fervid declamation of Patrick Henry. With these consummate powers were united a pure and spotless virtue, which no calumny has ever attempted to sully. Of the powers and