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,

Your favor of March the