ine promulgated by Washington, Adams, Jay and
Hamilton, of a centralized government or Union which, when national
questions are involved, should be, at all times, the supreme power of
the country, yet I concede to him wonderful foresight in advocating a
Constitution that would grant to the States the greatest possible
latitude. Other critics have also barked along the trail of this
distinguished man of destiny, charging him with being a demagogue, a
jingoist, an infidel and the like, but their barking has made him all
the greater, and has added new laurels to his marvelous career. Faults
he may have had, but who has not? Weaknesses he may have had, but who
is universally wise and strong? Burke, in his incomparable speech in
the English Parliament on the East India bill, spoke for many great men
in history when he thus alluded to the younger Fox: "He has faults; but
they are faults, that though they may, in a small degree, tarnish the
lustre, and sometimes impede the march of his abilities, have nothing
in them to extinguish the fire of great virtues. In those faults there
is no mixture of deceit, of hypocrisy, of pride, of ferocity, of
complexional despotism, or want of feeling for the distress of
mankind."

Like Charles James Fox, to whom Edmund Burke referred, Thomas Jefferson
was the foremost Commoner of his day, and he allowed no opportunity to
pass unimproved, to lift the common people to higher conceptions of
life and duty. Such men are rare, and I am glad to be able
conscientiously to place the name of Thomas Jefferson, in many
important respects, and particularly as the champion of the rights of
the common people, pre-eminently above all the other distinguished
Americans of his generation; and I wish it understood that I make this
statement upon a fair comprehensive knowledge of the acts and works of
the leading men of that period of our country's history.

Jefferson in early life accepted the idea or theory that the first and
most general truth in history is that men ought to be free. He
evidently felt that if happiness is the end of the human race, then
freedom is the condition, and that this freedom should not be a kind of
a half escape from thralldom and tyranny, but it should be ample and
absolute. This theory is most admirably expressed in the opening of the
Declaration of Independence, of which he was the sole author, and which
was adopted almost literally as he wrote it: "We hold these truths to
be sel