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JEFFERSON TO JEAN PIERRE BRISSOT DE WARVILLE, FROM PARIS. 

 AUGUST 15, 1786 



Jefferson's view of the place of agriculture is 

 expressed in the following letter. 



.... I have read with very great satisfaction the sheets of your 

 work on the commerce of France and the United States, which you were so 

 good as to put in my hands. I think you treat the subject, as far as 

 these sheets go, in an excellent manner. Were I to select any partic- 

 ular passages as giving me particular satisfaction, it would be those 

 wherein you prove to the United States that they will be more virtuous, 

 more free, and more happy, employed in agriculture, than as carriers 

 or manufacturers. It is a truth, and a precious one for them, if they 

 could be persuaded of it. - H. A. Washington, ed.. The Wr itin gs of Thomas 

 Jefferson . 2:11-13 (Washington, D. C, Taylor & Maury, 1853). 



JEFFERSON TO LAFAYETTE, FROM NICE, APRIL 11, 1787 



The following letter records Jefferson's observations on agriculture 

 in France on the eve of the French Revolution. 



.... I am constantly roving about, to see what I have never seen 

 before, and shall never see again. In the great cities, I go to see 

 what travellers think alone worthy of being seen; but I make a job of 

 it, and generally gulp it all down in a day. On the other hand, I 

 am never satiated with rambling through the fields and farms, examin- 

 ing the culture and cultivators, with a degree of curiosity which makes 

 some take me to be a fool, and others to be much wiser than I am. I 

 have been pleased to find among the people a less degree of physical 

 misery than I had expected. They are generally well clothed, and have 

 a plenty of food, not animal indeed, but vegetable, which is as 

 wholesome. Perhaps they are over-worked, the excess of the rent required 

 by the landlord obliging them to too many hours of labor in order to 

 produce that, and wherewith to feed and clothe themselves. The soil 

 of Champagne and Burgundy I have found more universally good than 

 I had expected, and as I could not help making a comparison with 

 England, I found that comparison more unfavorable to the latter than 



