Man, by his nature, is fitted for society, and society by its conveniences is fitted for man. The perfection of human society consists in that just degree of union among the individuals, which to each reserves freedom and independency, as far as is consistent with peace and good order. The bonds of society where every man shall be bound to dedicate the whole of his industry to the common interest would be of the strictest kind, but it would be unnatural and uncomfortable, because destructive of liberty and independence; so would be the enjoyment of the goods of fortune in common.
I am perfectly aware of the undeniable influence of Locke upon the theory of Kames; and it would be very unlikely that Jefferson had not read at that date Locke's "Treatise on Civil Government." The fact remains, however, that neither Locke, nor so far as I know any political thinker of the period, had yet so clearly defined that particular combination of individualism and respect for peace and order so characteristic of American democracy. We shall see in one of the following chapters how Jefferson, elaborating on this statement of Kames, derived from it all his conception of natural rights. The Scottish Lord was for him a master and a guide.
In Sir John Dalrymple, author of an "Essay Towards a General History of Feudal Property", in Francis Stoughton Sullivan's "An Historical Treatise of the Feudal Laws and the Constitution of the Laws of England", Jefferson studied the history of primogeniture and of entails and came to the conclusion that both of them had foundation neither in nature nor in law, and certainly did not appear in England before the Norman Conquest. He reached to the same finding in his long dissertation on the original common law, and thus we can trace directly through the "Commonplace Book" the sources of the Bill on Primogeniture, of the Bill for Religious Freedom, and of the Law to Abolish Entails, which Jefferson considered as forming a system "which would eradicate every fibre of ancient or future aristocracy and lay a foundation for a government truly republican."
Some of the entries in the "Commonplace Book" were evidently made after the period with which we are dealing in this chapter, although most of them can be dated before 1776. We have no means of determining whether Jefferson had undertaken a systematic study of federative governments when he was still a student, or at what time he copied the many extracts and quotations from Montesquieu. Nor can we enter here into a detailed discussion of all the articles. One or two facts, however, stand out even after a superficial glimpse of this repertory of ideas on government and society. The first is that Jefferson at that date, and indeed during most of his life, was not interested in abstract principles or in theoretical discussions. His was eminently the mind of a lawyer, and it is not for a lawyer to arrive at a definition of justice but to determine what the law says on a particular point. Yet in a country where law is not codified and the common law is the basis of the legal structure, it is impossible to find out what the law is without undertaking a historical study of the cases at hand in the different repertories. Men are either fallible or dishonest, false interpretations creep in, texts are distorted from their original meaning, and thus it becomes necessary to apply to legal decisions the rules of historical evidence formulated by Bolingbroke.
After undertaking such a study, Jefferson arrived at a very curious conclusion; that at a time which was not buried in a mythological past, the Anglo-Saxons had lived under customs and unwritten laws based upon the natural rights of man and permitting the individual to develop freely, normally and happily. In the course of time, these free institutions deteriorated through the nefarious influences of several agencies. Unwritten law became written law and jurists succeeded in concealing under their sophistry and verbiage the primitive intent of natural legislation. Priests, striving to extend their domination over a realm which primitively was foreign to them, introduced religious prescriptions into civil laws and thus diminished the rights of the individual. Conquerors and a long lineage of hereditary kings further modified primitive institutions in order to provide an apparently legal foundation for their usurpations, until the people, no longer able to withstand patiently the evils of tyranny, arose and recovered at least some of their rights.
Such a conspectus of the history of England was neither new nor original; it was one of the favorite contentions of English jurists during the eighteenth century, and nowhere perhaps is it more forcibly developed than in the last chapter of Blackstone's "Commentaries", "Of the rise, progress and gradual improvements of the laws of England." It is fundamentally also the doctrine of Jefferson, who went much farther than any of the English political thinkers in his revindication of the Saxon liberties.
One may see already how such a conception differs from the theories of Rousseau and the French philosophers, and indeed from those of the English philosophers. And this is easily explained, even if too seldom realized. Born in the eighteenth century, Jefferson is in some respects a man of the eighteenth century, but no greater mistake could be made than to apply to him the same standards that apply to European political thinkers. The very fact that he was born and grew up in a remote colony prevented him from joining any particular school of political philosophy. He had comparatively few books at his disposal, certainly fewer gazettes, and only faint echoes of the philosophical battles raging in Europe reached the capital of Virginia. During the long winter evenings at Shadwell, he had ample time to think, to sift from the books he was reading, not matter of passing interest, but matter of practical value and principles susceptible of being applied to the society which he knew and in which he lived. He could not have the cosmopolitan and universal outlook of thinkers who had traveled and met with representatives of many nationalities. His "Literary Bible", as well as his "Commonplace Book", contains many examples which might be used to illustrate his provincialism or, if one prefers, his regionalism.
No man can become genuinely interested in things he has never seen and cannot imagine. He had never seen the English countryside and so, when he copied from Thomson's description of spring, he selected only passages that could apply as well to the landscape of Virginia as to the scenery of old England. Even when he read Horace he eliminated verses with too much local color, unknown plants, unfamiliar dishes and beverages, until the descriptions of a Roman farm by the old poet would fit a typical Virginia plantation with the slaves singing in the great courtyard after the day's work is done. He knew Latin and Greek, French and Italian, and perhaps even German; for the time and place his library was rich and varied. He had read Milton, Shakespeare, Dryden, Buchanan, Thomson, Thomas Moss; he had studied Kames, Pelloutier, Stanyan, Eden, Baccaria, Montesquieu and possibly Voltaire's "Essai sur les Moeurs", but from each of these he had culled facts and definitions rather than principles and theories. He had read some books of travel and listened with enjoyment to Fauquier's accounts of his long voyages. He was dreaming of visiting England, the continent and the Mediterranean, but the only form of society he knew was the colonial society of Virginia. No cosmopolitan tendencies would develop in such surroundings. Superior as he was in intelligence and culture to his fellow students and to the young gentry of Williamsburg, Jefferson, at the age of twenty-five, was not yet an American; he was distinctly a Virginian.