Thomas Jefferson, a Character Sketch Part 9

"Of all the cankers of human happiness, none corrodes with so silent, yet baneful a tooth, as indolence.

"Body and mind both unemployed, our being becomes a burthen, and every object about us loathsome, even the dearest.

"Idleness begets ennui, ennui the hypochondria, and that a diseased body.

"No laborious person was ever yet hysterical.

"Exercise and application produce order in our affairs, health of body and cheerfulness of mind. These make us precious to our friends.

"It is while we are young that the habit of industry is formed. If not then, it never is afterwards.

"The future of our lives, therefore, depends on employing well the short period of youth.

"If at any moment, my dear, you catch yourself in idleness, start from it as you would the precipice of a gulf.

"You are not, however, to consider yourself as unemployed while taking exercise. That is necessary for your health, and health is the first of all objects."

t.i.tLES OF HONOR AND OFFICE.

He wrote to one of his friends concerning this matter as follows:

"The Senate and Representatives differed about the t.i.tle of President.

The former wanted to style him 'His Highness, George Was.h.i.+ngton, President of the United States, and Protector of their Liberties.' I hope the terms of Excellency, Honor, Wors.h.i.+p, Esquire, forever disappear from among us. I wish that of Mr. would follow them."

THE TERM OF THE PRESIDENCY.

Mr. Jefferson was inclined at first to have the President elected for seven years, and be thereafter ineligible. He afterwards modified his views in favor of the present system, allowing only a continuance for eight years.

Regarding a third term, he says in his autobiography: "Should a President consent to be a candidate for a third election, I trust he would be rejected on this demonstration of ambitious views."

THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS AND LAWYERS.

Mr. Jefferson wrote in his autobiography regarding the Continental Congress in 1783:

"Our body was little numerous, but very contentious. Day after day was wasted on the most unimportant questions.

"If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise, in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing and talk by the hour?

"That one hundred and fifty lawyers should do business together ought not to be expected."

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.

George Bancroft, in glowing words, speaks of this great creation of the genius of Jefferson:

"This immortal State paper, which for its composer was the aurora of enduring fame, was 'the genuine effusion of the soul of the country at that time.'

"It was the revelation of its mind, when, in its youth, its enthusiasm, its sublime confronting of danger, it rose to the highest creative powers of which man is capable."--Bancroft's U S., vol. 8, ch. 70.

JEFFERSON AND THE MECKLENBURG DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.

"On the 30th of April, 1819, some forty-three years after Jefferson's Declaration was written, there appeared in the Raleigh (N. C.) Register what purported to be a Declaration of Independence, drawn up by the citizens of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, on May 20th, 1775.

As this was nearly fourteen months before the Colonies declared their independence, and as many of the expressions in the Mecklenburg paper bore a striking resemblance to Jefferson's expressions, it excited a good deal of curiosity, and led to a discussion which has been continued to the present day. Those desirous of seeing the arguments pro and con, put in their latest and best form, will find them in two articles in the 'Magazine of American History,' in the January and March numbers of 1889.

"It is sufficient here to say that there was found among the British State papers, as well as in contemporaneous newspapers in this country, the original Mecklenburg paper, which was not a Declaration of Independence at all, but simply patriotic resolutions similar to those which were published in most of the Colonies at that time.

"And so the Mecklenburg Declaration takes its place with the stories of Pocahontas and of William Tell."--Boutell.

THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE.

In effecting the purchase of Louisiana, Mr. Jefferson has thus been eulogized by James G. Blaine, in his "Twenty Years of Congress:"

"Mr. Jefferson made the largest conquest ever peacefully achieved, at a cost so small that the sum expended for the entire territory does not equal the revenue which has since been collected on its soil in a single month, in time of great public peril."

JEFFERSON AND BENEDICT ARNOLD.

Benedict Arnold, with the British troops, had entered the Chesapeake in January, 1781, and sailed up the James River. He captured Richmond, the capital, then a town of less than two thousand people, and destroyed everything upon which he could lay his hands.

Jefferson summoned the militia, who came by thousands to oppose the traitor. Arnold, however, sailed down to Portsmouth and escaped.

Jefferson then urged upon General Muhlenburg the importance of picking out a few of the best men in his command "to seize and bring off the greatest of all traitors."

"I will undertake," he said, "if they are successful in bringing him off alive, that they shall receive five thousand guineas reward among them."

The effort was not made.