Thus we are led to a very unexpected conclusion. There is little doubt that Jefferson's democratic theories were confirmed and clarified by his prolonged stay in Europe. But this was not due to the lessons he received from the French philosophers. He had gone to France under the misapprehension that he would be considered there as a "savage from the mountains of America"; he had been dazzled at first by the splendor of the old world, but he had soon overcome his admiration and arrived at the conclusion that the game was not worth the candle. Life in Paris was very pleasant, but some one had to foot the bill, and the general fate of humanity was most deplorable in Europe. Such are the general impressions he sent to his friend Bellini one year after arriving in Paris:
It is a true picture of that country to which they say we shall pass hereafter; and where we are to see God and his angels in splendor, and crowds of the damned trampled under their feet. The great mass of the people suffer under physical and moral oppression; but the condition of the great if more closely observed cannot compare with the degree of happiness which is enjoyed in America. Among them there is no family life, no conjugal love, no domestic happiness; intrigues of love occupy the young and those of ambition, the elder part of the great.
Much, very much inferior, this, to the tranquil, permanent felicity with which domestic society in America blesses most of its inhabitants; leaving them to follow steadily those pursuits which health and reason approve, and rendering truly delicious the intervals of those pursuits!
If one looks to another field, the situation is very similar. "In science, the mass of the people are two centuries behind ours; their literature half a dozen years before us." But that is no serious inconvenience; books which are really good acquire a reputation in that lapse of time and then pass over to America, while poor books, controversial and uncertain knowledge are naturally weeded out, so that America is not bothered with that "swarm of nonsensical publications which issue daily from a thousand presses, and perishes almost in issuing."
On some points, however, Europeans have a decided superiority over the Americans: they have more amiable manners, they are more polite, more temperate, "they do not terminate the most sociable meals by transforming themselves into brutes. I have never seen a man drunk in France, even among the lowest of the people."
Finally in the arts there is no possible comparison:
Were I to proceed to tell you how much I enjoy their architecture, sculpture, painting, music, I should want words. It is in these arts they shine. The last of them particularly, is an enjoyment the deprivation of which with us, cannot be calculated. I am almost ready to say, it is the only thing which from my heart I envy them, and which, in spite of all the authority of the Decalogue, I do covet.[116]
Nor are we to believe that in Jefferson's opinion this was a small achievement. Had he been more poetically inclined he might have repeated the apostrophe of the old poet: "France mother of all the arts." But when all is told, the fact remained that Europe had more to learn from America than she could possibly give to the new nation, and thereupon Jefferson started to "boost" his own country. Protesting against a pseudo-discovery of an English wheelwright, he declared that the idea had been stolen from Doctor Franklin who had observed it in Pennsylvania, Delaware and Jersey, and the Jersey farmers might have borrowed it from Homer, "for ours are the only farmers who can read Homer."[117] Against the architectural feats of the Europeans it is not unfair to claim the superiority of American scenery, particularly of the Virginia marvels, such as the Natural Bridge, for "that kind of pleasure surpasses much in my estimation, whatever I find on this side of the Atlantic."[118]
At the end of his journey in France and Italy he conceded that there are indeed in these countries "things worth our imitation." But he immediately added, "the accounts from our country give me to believe that we are not in a condition to hope of the imitation of anything good."[119] In the meantime it is better for the Americans to stay at home, for "travelling makes men wiser, but less happy"; and he wrote to Peter Carr, whose education he had undertaken to direct: "There is no place where your pursuit of knowledge will be so little obstructed by foreign objects, as your own country, nor any, wherein the virtues of the heart will be less exposed to be weakened."[120]