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Letters of Thomas Jefferson Concerning Philology and the Classics
Letters of Thomas Jefferson Concerning Philology and the Classics Author:Thomas Jefferson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. The Classical Education. It was an a priori axiom of Jefferson's political philosophy that no government can continue good but under control of a free pe... more »ople. It was an a priori axiom, because history had before his day furnished no example of a true Jeffersonian democracy, and hence there was no guarantee in experience that even such a government could safeguard itself permanently against all danger of deterioration and change. On the contrary, we have already heard John Adams expressing to Jefferson in drastic terms his own theoretical skepticism as to the ultimate perfectibility and permanence of human institutions: "Will you tell me how to prevent riches from becoming the effect of temperance? Will you tell me how to prevent riches from producing luxury? Will you tell me how to prevent luxury from producing effeminacy, intoxication, extravagance, vice and folly?" But the burning faith of Jefferson in the political destiny of man under the salutary influences of democracy and education was proof against the grim logic of this political pessimism: "No government can continue good," he writes to Adams concerning the decline and fall of the Roman Republic, "but under the control of the people, and their people were so demoralized and depraved as to be incapable of exercising a wholesome control. Their reformation, then, was to be taken up ab incunabulis. Their minds were to be informed by education what is right and what is wrong; to be encouraged in habits of virtue and deterred from those of vice by the dread of punishments, proportioned indeed, but irremissible; in all cases, to follow truth as the only safe guide, and to eschew error, which bewilders us in one false consequence after another in endless succession. These are the inculcations necessary to render the peop...« less