Slavery itself was probably a factor for good in the character of such a man as Jefferson,—it afforded a daily exercise in the virtues of benevolence and self-control. How he treated the blacks may be gathered from a story, told by his superintendent, of a slave named Jim who had been caught stealing nails from the nail-factory: “When Mr. Jefferson came, I sent for Jim, and I never saw any person, white or black, feel as badly as he did when he saw his master. The tears streamed down his face, and he begged for pardon over and over again. I felt very badly myself. Mr. Jefferson turned to me and said, ‘Ah, sir, we can’t punish him. He has suffered enough already.’ He then talked to him, gave him a heap of good advice, and sent him to the shop.... Jim said: ‘Well I’se been a-seeking religion a long time, but I never heard anything before that sounded so, or made me feel so, as I did when Master said, “Go, and don’t do so any more,” and now I’se determined to seek religion till I find it;’ and sure enough he afterwards came to me for a permit to go and be baptized.... He was always a good servant afterward.” Another element that contributed to the efficiency and the high standard of the early Virginia statesman was a good, old-fashioned classical education. They were familiar, to use Matthew Arnold’s famous expression, “with the best that has ever been said or done.” This was no small advantage to men who were called upon to act as founders of a republic different indeed from the republics of Greece and Rome, but still based upon the same principles, and demanding an exercise of the same heroic virtues. The American Revolution would never have cut quite the figure in the world which history assigns to it, had it not been conducted with a kind of classic dignity and decency; and to this result nobody contributed more than Jefferson. Such was Virginia in the eighteenth century,—at the base of society, the slaves; next, a lower class, rough, ignorant, and somewhat brutal, but still wholesome, and possessing the primitive virtues of courage and truth; and at the top, the landed gentry, luxurious, proud, idle and dissipated for the most part, and yet blossoming into a few characters of a type so high that the world has hardly seen a better. Had he been born in Europe, Jefferson would doubtless have devoted himself to music, or to architecture, or to literature, or to science,—for in all these directions his taste was nearly equally strong; but these careers being closed to him by the circumstances of the colony, he became a lawyer, and then, under pressure of the Revolution, a politician and statesman.