The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 6 (of 9): Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and PrivateJefferson, Thomas
History
The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 6 (of 9): Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and Private
Jefferson, Thomas
United States -- Politics and government -- 1775-1783; United States -- Politics and government -- 1783-1865
number of the most promising subjects, to be completed at an University,
where all the useful sciences should be taught. Worth and genius would
thus have been sought out from every condition of life, and completely
prepared by education for defeating the competition of wealth and birth
for public trusts. My proposition had, for a further object, to impart
to these wards those portions of self-government for which they are best
qualified, by confiding to them the care of their poor, their roads,
police, elections, the nomination of jurors, administration of justice
in small cases, elementary exercises of militia; in short, to have made
them little republics, with a warden at the head of each, for all those
concerns which, being under their eye, they would better manage than the
larger republics of the county or State. A general call of ward meetings
by their wardens on the same day through the State, would at any time
produce the genuine sense of the people on any required point, and would
enable the State to act in mass, as your people have so often done, and
with so much effect by their town meetings. The law for religious freedom,
which made a part of this system, having put down the aristocracy of
the clergy, and restored to the citizen the freedom of the mind, and
those of entails and descents nurturing an equality of condition among
them, this on education would have raised the mass of the people to
the high ground of moral respectability necessary to their own safety,
and to orderly government; and would have completed the great object
of qualifying them to select the veritable aristoi, for the trusts of
government, to the exclusion of the pseudalists; and the same Theognis
who has furnished the epigraphs of your two letters, assures us that
"Ουδεμιαν πω, Κυρν', αγαθοι πολιν ωλεσαν ανδρες." Although this law has
not yet been acted on but in a small and inefficient degree, it is still
considered as before the legislature, with other bills of the revised
code, not yet taken up, and I have great hope that some patriotic spirit
will, at a favorable moment, call it up, and make it the key-stone of
the arch of our government.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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