Hardly was the war ended when the country's needs summoned Washington again to long and arduous service. Retired from the Presidency, his successor called him, not in vain, to head the army which the threatened French war would call into action. Who can blame him that he did not undertake in addition a complete reorganization of the labor system of his own farms and of Virginia? Inconsistent perhaps it was,--a very human inconsistency,--that his slaves, who, he told Bernard, were unfit for freedom, were given their freedom by his will, though not until his wife's death. That we may take as an imperfect essay of conscience to deal with a situation so complicated that no ideal solution was apparent. But we may fairly read as his unspoken legacy to his countrymen of the next generation: "My associates and I have won national independence, social order, and equal rights for our own race; deal you as courageously and strongly with the problems which remain." Jefferson was an enthusiast for moral ideals, and a warm believer in the merit and trustworthiness of average humanity. He ennobled the struggle of the colonies against England by writing on the flag the universal and undying ideas that the authority of governments rests solely on their justice and public utility, and that every man has an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And Jefferson did not flinch, as did many of his associates, from giving that right a full and general application to blacks as well as whites. Nor was he a mere doctrinaire. As he revolted from the abstract injustice of slavery, so its concrete abuses as he saw them, filled him with horror. He wrote: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just." He described what he had seen. "The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions,--the most unremitting despotism on the one part and degrading submission on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it, for man is an imitative animal.... The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose rein to the worst of passions; and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities."