It has long been the fashion, among a certain school of half-hearted
Americans--and unless I am mistaken, the teaching has increased during
the last decades--to minimize the value of Jefferson's "self-evident
truths." Rufus Choate, himself a consummate rhetorician, sneered at
those "glittering generalities," and countless college-bred men, some of
them occupying the highest positions, have echoed the sneer. The essence
of the objection to Jefferson's platform lies of course in his
phrase, "all men are created equal," with the subsidiary phrase
about governments "deriving their just powers from the consent of the
governed." Editors and congressmen and even college professors
have proclaimed themselves unable to assent to these phrases of the
Declaration, and unable even to understand them. These objectors
belong partly, I think, in Jefferson's category of "nervous
persons"--"anti-republicans," as he goes on to define them--"whose
languid fibres have more analogy with a passive than an active state of
things." Other objectors to the phrase "all men are created equal" have
had an obvious personal or political motive for refusing assent to
the proposition. But "no intelligent man," says one of Jefferson's
biographers, "has ever misconstrued it [the Declaration] except
intentionally."

Nobody would claim today that Thomas Jefferson's statement of the
sentiments and reasons for the independence of the thirteen British
colonies in 1776 was an adequate handbook of political wisdom, fit for
all the exigencies of contemporary American democracy. It is not that.
It is simply, in Lincoln's phrase, one of "the standard maxims of free
society" which no democracy can safely disregard.

Jefferson's long life, so varied, so flexible, so responsive to the
touch of popular forces, illustrates the process by which the Virginia
mind of 1743 became the nationalized, unionized mind of 1826. It is
needless here to dwell upon the traits of his personal character: his
sweetness of spirit, his stout-heartedness in disaster, his scorn of
money, his love for the intellectual life. "I have no ambition to govern
men," he wrote to Edward Rutledge. He was far happier talking about
Greek and Anglo-Saxon with Daniel Webster before the fire-place
of Monticello than he ever was in the presidential chair. His
correspondence was enormous. His writings fill twenty volumes. In his
theories of education he was fifty years ahead of his time; in his
absolute tr