felt it to be his duty, as soon as he mounted the throne, to pardon all
who had been convicted under it. But before he left the White House he
attempted to put down Federal opposition in the same way. Judges were
impeached; United States attorneys brought libel suits against editors,
and even prosecuted such men as Judge Reeve and the Rev. Mr. Backus of
Connecticut. It was a pet doctrine of Jefferson that one generation had
no right to bind a succeeding one; hence every constitution and all laws
should become null and every national debt void at the end of nineteen
years, or of whatever period should be ascertained to be the average
duration of human life after the age of twenty-one. He adhered to this
notion through life, although Mr. Madison, when urged by him to expound
it, gently pointed out its absurdity. When the news of the massacres of
September reached the United States at an unfortunate moment for the
Francoman party, Jefferson forgot this elementary principle and his
logic. He professed that he deplored the bloody fate of the victims as
much as any man, but they had perished for the sake of future
generations, and that thought consoled him. Finally, the man who had
announced in a public address, that he considered it a moral duty never
to subscribe to a lottery, nor to engage in a game of chance, petitioned
the Legislature of Virginia for permission to dispose of his house and
lands in a raffle, and in his memorial recapitulated his services to the
country to strengthen his claim upon their indulgence.

Jefferson professed great faith in human nature; but he meant the human
nature of the uneducated and the poor. Kings, rulers, nobles, rich
persons, and generally all of the party opposed to him, were hopelessly
wrong. The errors of the people, when they committed any, were
accidental and momentary; but in the other class, they were proofs of an
ineradicable perversity. His faith in human reason as the only power
for good government must have been shaken by the students of his