bright home was in the Settin' Sun." He was nothing of the kind. His
judgment was probably unsound on the questions of foreign policy on which
as Secretary of State he differed from Washington, and he leaned, no
doubt, to a jealous and too narrow insistence upon the limits set by the
Constitution to the Government's power. But he and his party were
emphatically right in the resistance which they offered to certain
needless measures of coercion. As President, though he was not a great
President, he suffered the sensible course of administration originated
by his opponent to continue undisturbed, and America owed to one bold and
far-seeing act of his the greatest of the steps by which her territory
was enlarged. It is, however, in the field of domestic policy, which
rested with the States and with which a President has often little to do,
that the results of his principles must be sought. Jefferson was a man
who had worked unwearyingly in Virginia at sound, and what we should now
call conservative, reforms, establishing religious toleration, reforming
a preposterous land law, seeking to provide education for the poor,
striving unsuccessfully for a sensible scheme of gradual emancipation of
the slaves. In like manner his disciples after him, in their several
States, devoted themselves to the kind of work in removing manifest
abuses and providing for manifest new social needs in which English
reformers like Romilly and Bentham, and the leaders of the first reformed
Parliament, were to be successful somewhat later. The Americans who so
exasperated Dickens vainly supposed themselves to be far ahead of England
in much that we now consider essential to a well-ordered nation. But
there could have been no answer to Americans of Jefferson's generation if
they had made the same claim.

It is with this fact in mind that we should approach the famous words of
Jefferson which echoed so long with triumphant or reproachful sound in
the ears of Americans and to which long after Lincoln was to make a