the governed. Where every citizen
has by systematic training been rooted and grounded in the fruitful
soil of knowledge, the principles and practices of self-restraint, and
the generous ways of freedom, his loyalty to country cannot easily be
shaken, nor can he easily be drawn into hostile schemes against the
government that protects him. Jefferson saw clearly the necessity of a
general system of education, and was among the very first to move in
the direction of its establishment. He was so earnest an advocate of
the necessity for and the advantages of education, that he never
relaxed his efforts, although vigorously opposed by many of his able
associates, until he established the University of Virginia to be
finally supported by the State, as an open forum for the education of
the young men of the Commonwealth; and his biographers inform us that
he regarded this the most important achievement of his great career. In
fact, he esteemed this victory so highly that he directed the words to
be placed upon his tombstone at Monticello--"Founder of the University
of Virginia." No act of his revealed more fully than this the tactician
and the statesman, and no single act of his, although his entire career
was strewn with great deeds, did so much to usher in a golden era of
humanity and an universal monarchy of man, which, under God, is coming
by and by.

Jefferson began public life early. Shortly after his graduation from
William and Mary's College, the oldest educational institution in
Virginia, he took up the study of law, and within a very few years he
had gathered about him a profitable clientage. In this, the foremost of
the learned professions, his genius as a tactician was early displayed.
On account of his comparative youthfulness and the limited time that he
had been at the bar, he could not, in the nature of things, have been
an erudite lawyer, and yet the registry of the courts before which he
practised showed that in the fourth year, after he became a barrister,
he was employed in four hundred and thirty important cases. No one but
a tactful man, however great his learning, in so short a period of
time, could make a record of that exalted grade. He was, therefore, at
the beginning of his career as a public man, frank, earnest, cordial,
sympathetic in his manner, full of confidence in men, and sanguine in
his views of life, which gave him a grip upon those about him, as a
leader equipped by nature for achievements o