Thomas Jefferson, writing from Paris in 1788 to Mrs. Bingham, spoke in less positive language but perhaps just as clearly the opinion of the eighteenth century: "The gay and thoughtless Paris is now become a furnace of politics. Men, women, children talk nothing else & you know that naturally they talk much, loud & warm.... You too have had your political fever. But our good ladies, I trust, have been too wise to wrinkle their foreheads with politics. They are contented to soothe & calm the minds of their husbands returning ruffled from political debate. They have the good sense to value domestic happiness above all others. There is no part of the earth where so much of this is enjoyed as in America. You agree with me in this; but you think that the pleasures of Paris more than supply its wants; in other words, that a Parisian is happier than an American. You will change your opinion, my dear madam, and come over to mine in the end. Recollect the women of this capital, some on foot, some on horses, & some in carriages hunting pleasure in the streets in routes, assemblies, & forgetting that they have left it behind them in their nurseries & compare them with our own country women occupied in the tender and tranquil amusements of domestic life, and confess that it is a comparison of Americans and angels."[120] And Franklin writes thus to his wife from London in 1758: "You are very prudent not to engage in party Disputes. Women never should meddle with them except in Endeavors to reconcile their Husbands, Brothers, and Friends, who happen to be of contrary Sides. If your Sex can keep cool, you may be a means of cooling ours the sooner, and restoring more speedily that social Harmony among Fellow Citizens that is so desirable after long and bitter Dissension."[121] Again, he writes thus to his sister: "Remember that modesty, as it makes the most homely virgin amiable and charming, so the want of it infallably renders the perfect beauty disagreeable and odious. But when that brightest of female virtues shines among other perfections of body and mind in the same mind, it makes the woman more lovely than angels."[122] What seems rather strange to the twentieth century American, the women of colonial days apparently agreed with such views. So few avenues of activity outside the home had ever been open to them that they may have considered it unnatural to desire other forms of work; but, be that as it may, there are exceedingly few instances in those days, of neglect of home for the sake of a career in public work. Abigail Adams frequently expressed it as her belief that a woman's first business was to help her husband, and that a wife should desire no greater pleasure. "To be the strength, the inmost joy, of a man who within the conditions of his life seems to you a hero at every turn--there is no happiness more penetrating for a wife than this."[123]