_ Ch. XIV. ] But the
people he cherished almost exclusively were the small landowning
farmers: "Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God,
if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made his peculiar
deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which
He keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the
face of the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is
a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example."
However much of the romantic return to nature may have entered into
this exclamation, there was also an element of solid sense. Jefferson
was right in thinking that a group of independent farmers comes nearer
to fulfilling the requirements of spontaneous democracy than any other
human society. But if you are to preserve the ideal, you must fence
off these ideal communities from the abominations of the world. If the
farmers are to manage their own affairs, they must confine affairs to
those they are accustomed to managing. Jefferson drew all these
logical conclusions. He disapproved of manufacture, of foreign
commerce, and a navy, of intangible forms of property, and in theory
of any form of government that was not centered in the small
self-governing group. He had critics in his day: one of them remarked
that "wrapt up in the fullness of self-consequence and strong enough,
in reality, to defend ourselves against every invader, we might enjoy
an eternal rusticity and live, forever, thus apathized and vulgar
under the shelter of a selfish, satisfied indifference.
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