Thank You Jeebus

I just got home. I'm going to take a few days off from thinking about everything horrible I know about the US political system. After all, there will be years available for that.

So, in my current Up With People spirit, here are two of the best things ever said by Thomas Jefferson.

First, this is from a 1798 letter from Jefferson about the passage of the repressive Alien & Sedition Acts:

[The 1798 political situation] is not new. It is the old practice of despots to use a part of the people to keep the rest in order, and those who have once got an ascendency and possessed themselves of all the resources of the nation, their revenues and offices, have immense means for retaining their advantages. But our present situation is not a natural one. The body of our countrymen is substantially republican through every part of the Union...

A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to it's true principles. It is true that in the mean time we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war & long oppressions of enormous public debt...If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, & then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are the stake. Better luck, therefore, to us all...

And this is from an 1823 letter from Jefferson to John Adams, three years before they both died. Note Jefferson's emphasis on the importance of the printing press, and consider how he likely would have said exactly the same thing about the internet. I'd argue that we've taken a 185 year detour since the second letter—Jefferson never envisioned the centralization of power that would be made possible by TV and radio—but the internet has put us back on this road.

The generation which commences a revolution rarely compleats it. Habituated from their infancy to passive submission of body and mind to their kings and priests... their ignorance and bigotry make them instruments often, in the hands of the Bonapartes and Iturbides to defeat their own rights and purposes. This is the present situation of Europe and Spanish America. but it is not desperate.

The light which has been shed on mankind by the art of printing has eminently changed the condition of the world. as yet that light has dawned on the midling classes only of the men of Europe. The kings and the rabble of equal ignorance, have not yet recieved it's rays; but it continues to spread. And, while printing is preserved, it can no more recede than the sun return on his course.

A first attempt to recover the right of self-government may fail, so may a 2d. a 3d. &c. but as a younger, and more instructed race comes on, the sentiment become more and more intuitive, and a 4th. a 5th. Or some subsequent one of the ever renewed attempts will ultimately succeed... all will attain representative government... to attain all this however rivers of blood must yet flow, & years of desolation pass over, yet the object is worth rivers of blood, and years of desolation. For what inheritance, so valuable, can man leave to his posterity?... You and I shall look down from another world on these glorious atchievements to man, which will add to the joys even of heaven.

Ironically, of course, John Adams had been responsible for the Alien & Sedition Acts 25 years previously.

—Jonathan Schwarz