soundness testimony the most pointed.  We have but to take the first volume of Jefferson’s Works, published by order of Congress, and we find Jefferson’s anti-slavery letter to Dr. Price, written in 1785, urging the Doctor to work against pro-slavery ideas in the young men, and to exhort the young men of Virginia to the “redress of the enormity.”  Incidentally he speaks of Mr. Wythe as already doing great good in this direction among these same young men, and declares him “one of the most virtuous of characters, and whose sentiments on the subject of slavery are unequivocal.”

So much for the direct influences on Jefferson’s early culture.

Studying, next, the indirect influences on his early culture, we see that the reform literature of that time was coming almost entirely from France.  Active, earnest men everywhere were grasping the theories and phrases of Voltaire and Rousseau and Montesquieu, to wield them against every tyranny.  Terrible weapons these,—­often searing and scarring frightfully those who brandished them,—­yet there was not one chance in a thousand that any man who had once made any considerable number of these ideas his own could ever support slavery.  Whoever, at that time, studied the “Contrat Social,” or the defence of Jean Calas, whatever other sins he might commit, was no more likely to advocate systematic oppression than are they who now read with reverence Dr. Arnold and Charles Kingsley; and whoever, at that time, read earnestly “The Spirit of the Laws” was as sure to fight slavery as any man who to-day reveres Channing or Theodore Parker.  Those French thinkers threw such heat and light into Jefferson’s young mind, that every filthy weed of tyrannic quibble or pro-slavery paradox must have been shrivelled.

And the young statesman grew under this influence as we should expect.  In his twenty-seventh year he sat in the Virginia House of Burgesses, and his first effort in legislation was, in his own words, “an effort for the permission of the emancipation of slaves, which was rejected, and, indeed, during the regal government nothing liberal could expect success.”  His whole career in those years, whether as public man or private man, shows that his hatred of slavery was bitter.  But there was such a press of other work during this founding period, that this hatred took shape not so much in a steady siege as in a series of pitched battles.  The work to be done was immense, and Jefferson bore the bulk of it.  He took upon himself one-third of the revising and codifying of the Virginia laws, and did even more than this.  He undertook, in his own words, “a distinct series of labors which formed a system by which every fibre would be eradicated of ancient or future aristocracy.”  He effected the repeal of the laws of entail, and this prevented an aristocratic absorption of the soil; he effected the abolition of primogeniture, and this destroyed all chance of rebuilding feudal families;