coercion." Unwilling to commit his successor to the battle which he could not win himself, Jefferson signed the act on March 1, 1809, and three days later returned to private life.

The administration of Thomas Jefferson was a notable period in the development of the American nation. When he came to the presidency in 1801 our domain was bounded on the west by the Mississippi River, we touched the Gulf of Mexico at no point, no white man had crossed the continent, and but few were familiar with the shores of Lakes Michigan, Huron, and Superior. When he left the presidency eight years later the limits of the United States were the Rockies, the mouth of the Mississippi was ours, Lewis and Clark had penetrated the wilderness to the Pacific coast, and John Jacob Astor was planning his fur-posts on the Columbia River. Our population had grown from five million to seven million two hundred and fifty thousand, and was rapidly filling in the land between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi. Ohio, admitted as a State in 1802 with some fifty-five thousand inhabitants, counted two hundred and thirty thousand in 1810. Kentucky had grown from two hundred and twenty thousand to four hundred and six thousand, Tennessee from one hundred and five thousand to two hundred and sixty-one thousand, the Mississippi Territory from eight thousand to forty-one thousand. Our trade down the great

river, now wholly American from source to mouth, more than doubled during Jefferson's second term, reaching a figure in 1809 which foretold the day, not distant, when forty per cent of the foreign commerce of the United States should pass through the port of New Orleans. In the year before the Embargo Act took effect our exports and imports reached the considerable sum of one hundred and eight million dollars and one hundred and thirtyeight million dollars respectively-a total volume of trade not to be reached again until the year 1835.1

Jefferson's mind expanded with the country. His political philosophy broadened and his constitutional straitness was relaxed. Little by little the cautious responsibility with which he wished to see the executive circumscribed had yielded to the splendid opportunities for the exercise of power which the possession of high office brought. Before the close of his term he spoke and acted like a nationalist of the Federalist school. The erstwhile enemy of an industrial economy with its large cities and its thousands of "artificers," "the panderers of vice and the instruments by which the liberties of

1 The Embargo and Non-Intercourse Acts suddenly reduced exports to $22,000,000 and imports to $56,000,000 in 1808, and $52,000,000 and $59,000,000 respectively in 1809, which was far from a "total annihilation" of our commerce. The nadir was reached in the War of 1812, when our exports sank to $6,000,000 and our imports to $12,000,000 in the year 1814. From the conclusion of peace the recovery was steady, except in the panic year of 1819.

a country are overthrown," spoke sympathetically in his last message to Congress, in November, 1808, of the considerable investments of capital in industries destined to become permanent under the auspices of cheaper materials and subsistence, of the freedom of labor from taxation, and of protecting duties (!) and prohibitions. The erstwhile guardian of the "general government" within the limits definitely traced by the clauses of the Constitution, now suggested that Congress might appropriate the surplus of its revenues "to the improvement of roads, canals, rivers, education, and other great foundations of prosperity and union." But through all the phases of political development, amid the various vicissitudes of public and private fortune, in office or out of office, from his mature youth to his vigorous old age, there was one principle, sacred as a revelation from on high, from which Jefferson never swerved. He was convinced that the land of America, with all its material resources, belonged in full, undelegated possession to the successive generations of living men; that their rulers were but their honored servants, their laws the changing record of their evolving will, and their institutions the temporary form in which the travailing spirit of freedom was clothed. Thomas Jefferson believed in democracy.

Jefferson retired from the presidency under the shadow of the defeat of his long-cherished policy of

"peaceful coercion." On the eve of his departure from Washington he set his signature to the first and only important bill that Congress passed against his wishes during the eight years of his presidency. Still, when the great democrat took his quiet way to Monticello, men forgot the present discomfiture and remembered only the long service of forty years continuous devotion to his country. Congratulatory addresses poured in upon him from all sides. The memorial of his native State was particularly eloquent and touching. It reviewed the accomplishments of the administration, the pomp and state laid aside, the patronage discarded, the internal taxes abolished, the debt discharged, the pirates of the Mediterranean chastised, the national domain vastly increased. It recalled the peace with the civilized world, preserved through a season of uncommon difficulty and trial, the goodwill cultivated with the unfortunate aborigines of our country and the civilization humanely extended among them," and "that theme which above all others the historic genius will hang upon with rapture, the liberty of speech and the press preserved inviolate, without which genius and science are given to men in vain."

"From the first brilliant and happy moment of your resistance to foreign tyranny," the address concludes, "to the present day, we mark with pleasure and with gratitude the same uniform and con

sistent character-the same warm and devoted attachment to liberty and the Republic, the same Roman love of your country, her rights, her peace, her honor, her prosperity. How blessed will be the retirement into which you are about to go! How deservedly blessed it will be! For you carry with you the richest of all rewards, the recollection of a life well spent in the service of your country, and proofs the most decisive of the love, the gratitude, the veneration of your countrymen.'