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 EXCERPTS FROM JEFFERSON'S NOTES ON VIRGINIA 



Jefferson's Note s on Virginia (1785) has been described as "the first 

 comprehensive treatise upon the topography, Natural History and 

 natural resources of one of the United States, and was the 

 precursor of the great library of scientific reports 

 which have since been issued by the State and 

 Federal governments." It includes one 

 of the frequently quoted passages 

 from Jefferson on the place 

 of agriculture in the 

 life of the nation 



The political economists of Europe have established it as a prin- 

 ciple, that every State should endeavor to manufacture for itself; 

 and this principle, like many others, we transfer to America, without 

 calculating the difference of circumstance which should often produce 

 a difference of result. In Europe the lands are either cultivated, or 

 locked up against the cultivator. Manufacture must therefore be 

 resorted to of necessity not of choice, to support the surplus of 

 their people. But we have an immensity of land courting the industry 

 of the husbandman. Is it best then that all our citizens should be 

 employed in its improvement, or that one half should be called off 

 from that to exercise manufactures and handicraft arts for the other? 

 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. 

 It is the mark set on those, who, not looking up to heaven, to their 

 own soil and industry, as does the husbandman, for their subsistence, 

 depend for it on casualties and caprice of customers. Dependence 

 begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and 

 prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition. This, the natural 

 progress and consequence of the arts, has sometimes perhaps been re- 

 tarded by accidental circumstances; but, generally speaking, the pro- 

 portion which the aggregate of the other classes of citizens bears in 

 any State to that of its husbandmen, is the proportion of its unsound 

 to its healthy parts, and is a good enough barometer whereby to measure 

 its degree of corruption. - H. A. Washington, ed.. The Writings of Thomas 

 Jefferson . 8:405 (Washington, D. C, Taylor & Maury, 1854). 



