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; he effected a restoration of the rights of
conscience, and this overthrew all hope of an Established Church; he
forced on the bill for general education,--for thus, he said, would the
people be "qualified to understand their rights, to maintain them, and to
exercise with intelligence their parts in self-government." In all this
work his keen common sense always cut his way through questions at which
other men stopped or stumbled. Thus, in the discussion on primogeniture,
when Isaac Pendleton proposed, as a compromise, that they should adopt the
Hebrew principle and give a double portion to the eldest son, Jefferson
cut at once into the heart of the question. As he himself relates,--"I
observed, that, if the eldest son could eat twice as much, or do double
work, it might be a natural evidence of his right to a double portion; but
being on a par in his powers and wants with his brothe