"In modern history, there are but two nations with whose course it is interesting to us to be intimately acquainted, to wit: France and England. For the former, Millot's General History of France may be sufficient to the period when 1 Davila commences. He should be followed by Péréfixe, Sully, Voltaire's Louis XIV and XV, Lacretelle's XVIIIme Siècle, Marmontel's Régence, Foulongion's French Revolution, and Madame de Staël's, making up by a succession of particular history the general one which they want.

"Of England there is as yet no general history so faithful as Rapin's. He may be followed by Ludlow, Fox, Belsham, Hume, and Brodie. Hume's, were it faithful, would be the finest piece of history which has ever been written by man. Its unfortunate bias may be partly ascribed to the accident of his having written backwards. His maiden work was the History of the Stuarts. It was a first essay to try his strength before the public. And whether as a Scotchman be had really a partiality for that family, or thought that the lower their degradation the more fame he should acquire by raising them up to some favor, the object of his work was an apology for them. He spared nothing, therefore, to wash them white and to palliate their misgovernment. For this purpose he suppressed truths, advanced falsehoods, forged authorities, and falsified records. All this is proved on him unanswerably by Brodie. But so bewitching was his style and manner, that his readers were unwilling to doubt anything, swallowed everything, and all England became tories by the magic of his art. His pen revolutionized the public sentiment of that country more completely than the standing armies could ever have done, which were so much dreaded and deprecated by the patriots of that day."

Jefferson then proceeds, in a somewhat elaborate way, to criticise Hume's history of the dynasties preceding the Stuarts, in which Hume maintained the thesis of his first work, that "it was the people who encroached on the sovereign, not the sovereign who usurped the rights of the people." Hume's third work was a complete history of England, hasing its Constitution upon the physical force of the Norman conquest. Condemning this philosophy of English history, Jefferson maintained that whig historians "have always gone back to the Saxon period for the true principles of their Constitution, while the tories and Hume, their Coryphæus, date it from the Norman conquest, and hence conclude that the continual claim by the nation of the good old Saxon laws, and the struggles to recover them, were 'encroachments of the people on the crown, and not usurpations of the crown on the people.'" Jefferson said that Hume, with Brodie, was the last of English histories which the student should read. "If first read, Hume makes an English tory, from whence it is an easy step to American toryism [Federalism]. But there is a history, by Baxter, in which, abridging somewhat by leaving out some entire incidents as less interesting now than when Hume wrote, he has given the rest in the identical words of Hume, except that when he comes to a fact falsified, he states it truly, and when to a sup

pression of truth, he supplies it, never otherwise changing a word. It is, in fact, an editic expurgation of Hume. Those who shrink from the volume of Rapin may read this first, and from this lay a first foundation in a basis of truth.

"For modern Continental history, a very general idea may be first aimed at, leaving for future and occasional reading the particular histories of such countries as may excite curiosity at the time. This may be obtained from Mallet's Northern Antiquities, Voltaire's Esprit et Mœurs des Nations, Millot's Modern History, Russell's Modern Europe, Hallam's Middle Ages, and Robertson's Charles V.

"You ask what book I would recommend to be first read in law. I am very glad to find from a conversation with Mr. Gilmer, that he considers Coke [on] Littleton, as methodized by Thomas, as unquestionably the best elementary work, and the one which will be the text-book of his school. It is now as agreeable reading as Blackstone, and much more profound. I pray you to consider this hasty and imperfect sketch as intended merely to prove my wish to be useful to you, and that with it you will accept the assurance of my esteem and respect."

Thus, it is evident that Jefferson regarded both law and history as formative elements in the training of patriotic citizens who should become defenders of popular rights. The stress which he laid upon the teaching of early English, or "Anglo-Saxon", forms of government is most remarkable from two points of view. First, it shows that his political principles were historic and genuinely English,1 rather than purely philosophical and French. Second, Jefferson's "Anglo-Saxon" principles, if they had been taught in the University of Virginia and practically applied in local self-government, would have undermined that reverence for Norman principles which was the bane of Virginia and of the whole South for nearly two generations after the death of Jefferson.

POLITICAL ECONOMY.

Political economy appears to have been assigned to Professor Tucker during the first year of the University. Madison, acknowledging, December 26, 1826, the receipt of a copy of Dr. Cooper's published lectures on political economy, said that, before he had time to look into the work, “I had an opportunity of handing it over to Professor Tucker, of our University, now charged with that branch of instruction, who wished to see it, as I did that he should, not doubting that it well merited his perusal." By the same letter Madison acknowledges the receipt of Cooper's lectures on Civil Government and on the Constitution of the United States. 2 It is remarkable to find, at the very 1 Jefferson's views on the Anglo-Saxon origin of the English Constitution are finely illustrated in his letter to Maj. John Cartwright, June 5, 1824.

It is interesting to note that Dr. Cooper's immediate successor at Columbia, S. C., Francis Lieber, should have elaborated his class lectures into a magnum opus in the same field as Dr. Cooper's work. Lieber's masterpiece is called Civil Liberty and Self Government.

opening of the school of law and politics, these published lectures coming into the hands of its friends from a man who was originally chosen to represent those very subjects. At that time Dr. Cooper was undoubtedly the ablest professor in the country in the field of politics. and economics. One cannot refrain from wishing that he might have had a fair chance, among that original staff of eminent professors, to develop those very subjects which the University of Virginia, by reason of the exactions of other important studies, found no early opportunity to foster. But the eccentricities of Dr. Cooper's character and genius stood in the way of academic success, even in South Carolina.

CONCLUSION.

THE HOLY CAUSE OF THE UNIVERSITY.

No one can read from beginning to end the correspondence between Jefferson and Cabell without increasing amazement at the many ob stacles, the local opposition, the rivalries, jealousies, intolerance, indif ference, and popular lethargy over which these two men triumphed from 1817 to 1826, by their resolute perseverance and indomitable courage. At one time of financial emergency Cabell announced his return to the Senate in these courageous words to Jefferson: "I returned hastily over stormy rivers, and frozen roads, to rejoin the band of steadfast patriots engaged in the holy cause of the University."

It would be difficult to find in our entire educational history anything more heroic than that brave fight for the University of Virginia, a struggle begun and sustained for fifty years (1776-1826) by Jefferson, who was past fourscore when he saw his hopes fulfilled. To study the history of those fifty years gives one an exalted sense of the devotion and self-sacrifice of the Sage of Monticello in the execution of the greatest project of his life. What pains were bestowed upon those letters, which seem to us so easily written, and upon those numerous educational bills and reports which the student hurries through in a few minutes! The following, from a letter to Cabell, December 28, 1822, when Jefferson was in his eightieth year, shows what infinite labor those writings

cost:

"You propose to me to write to half a dozen gentlemen on this subject. You do not know, my dear sir, how great is my physical inability to write. The joints of [my] right wrist and fingers, in consequence of an ancient dislocation, are become so stiffened that I can write but at the pace of a snail. The copying our report, and my letter lately sent to the Governor, being seven pages only, employed me laboriously a whole week. The letter I am now writing you [three printed octavo pages] has taken me two days. I have been obliged, therefore, to withdraw from letter-writing but in cases of the most indispensable

urgency. A letter of a page or two costs me a day of labor, and a painful labor."

Cabell's more active service to the University in the Virginia Legislature lasted for about twenty years. His record there is all the more remarkable, because he was a man of delicate constitution. He suffered from malaria and hemorrhages of the lungs. His declaration,

Desk on which the Declaration of Independence was written. From a Drawing by Jefferson.' that he could not risk his life in a better cause than that of the University, was no unmeaning phrase, for he repeatedly exposed himself with the utmost daring in those arduous educational campaigns. Only once did he falter. In 1821, when suffering from bodily weakness, worn out

with public speaking, utterly weary of politics, and of Richmond hotels, where he had lived for thirteen winters, and longing for return to "domestic, rural, and literary leisure," Cabell wrote to Jefferson, expressing a purpose of speedily withdrawing from the Legislature. Then it was that the old hero felt his soul stir within him. He wrote a letter from the heights of Monticello, words of almost prophetic significance, moving

1 Published by courtesy of the Century Company.