like ourselves, enlightened, peaceable, and really free, the answer would be obvious.  ’Restore independence to all your foreign conquests, relieve Italy from the government of the rabble of Rome, consult it as a nation entitled to self-government, and do its will.’  But steeped in corruption, vice, and venality, as the whole nation was, (and nobody had done more than Caesar to corrupt it,) what could even Cicero, Cato, Brutus, have done, had it been referred to them to establish a good government for their country?  They had no ideas of government themselves, but of their degenerate Senate, nor the people of liberty, but of the factious opposition of their tribunes.  They had afterwards their Tituses, their Trajans, and Antoninuses, who had the will to make them happy, and the power to mould their government into a good and permanent form.  But it would seem as if they could not see their way clearly to do it.  No government can continue good, 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 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 people a sure basis for the structure of order and good government.  But this would have been an operation of a generation or two, at least, within which period would have succeeded many Neros and Commoduses, who would have quashed the whole process.  I confess then, I can neither see what Cicero, Cato, and Brutus, united and uncontrolled, could have devised to lead their people into good government, nor how this enigma can be solved, nor how further shown why it has been the fate of that delightful country never to have known, to this day, and through a course of five and twenty hundred years, the history of which we possess, one single day of free and rational government.  Your intimacy with their history, ancient, middle, and modern, your familiarity with the improvements in the science of government at this time, will enable you, if any body, to go back with our principles and opinions to the limes of Cicero, Cato, and Brutus, and tell us by what process these great and virtuous men could have led so unenlightened and vitiated a people into freedom and good government, et eris mihi magnus Apollo.  Cura ut valeas, et tibi persuadeas carissimum te mihi esse.

Th:  Jefferson.

LETTER CLI.—­TO WILLIAM SHORT, April 13, 1820

TO WILLIAM SHORT.

Monticello, April 13, 1820.

Dear Sir,