ideas of emancipation and progress, Jefferson was a thoroughly
practical young man. He fully understood the value of money, and
the possession of it was as sweet to him as to other men. Only he
would never soil his soul in acquiring it dishonourably. He was
convinced that society as at present organized was all wrong and
that the feudalism of the middle ages had simply given place to a
worse form of slavery--capitalistic driven labour--which had
resulted in the actual iniquitous conditions, the enriching of the
rich and the impoverishment of the poor. He was familiar with the
socialistic doctrines of the day and had taken a keen interest in
this momentous question, this dream of a regenerated mankind. He
had read Karl Marx and other socialistic writers, and while his
essentially practical mind could hardly approve all their
programme for reorganizing the State, some of which seemed to him
utopian, extravagant and even undesirable, he realised that the
socialistic movement was growing rapidly all over the world and
the day was not far distant when in America, as to-day in Germany
and France, it would be a formidable factor to reckon with.

But until the socialistic millennium arrived and society was
reorganized, money, he admitted, would remain the lever of the
world, the great stimulus to effort. Money supplied not only the
necessities of life but also its luxuries, everything the material
desire craved for, and so long as money had this magic purchasing
power, so long would men lie and cheat and rob and kill for its
possession. Was life worth living without money? Could one travel
and enjoy the glorious spectacles Nature affords--the rolling
ocean, the majestic mountains, the beautiful lakes, the noble
rivers--without money? Could the book-lover buy books, the art-
lover purchase pictures? Could one have fine houses to live in, or