Writing just a century ago, and a few years after Jefferson’s death, one of his earliest biographers said that it had been that statesman’s fate “to be at once loved and praised by his friends, and more hated and reviled by his adversaries than any of his compatriots.” The fact that much the same could be said of the writing about him today merely shows that the man is still alive in so far as his influence is both felt and feared. So is his great antagonist Hamilton. These two exponents of contrasted philosophies of government, though dead, yet live and are in the thick of the fight today. The issues for which they fought with all their strength are not yet settled. Indeed these issues have broadened and deepened until one in especial has become perhaps the most burning of all in a bewildered and angry world, the question whether the people can govern themselves or must be governed.  
Although a political philosopher, Jefferson never set forth his views in any formal treatise, as did John Adams in his voluminous works or Hamilton in The Federalist. Probably the most widely read man of his time in America, Jefferson had a broader range of interests—political, religious, economic, agricultural, aesthetic and scientific—than did any other of the leaders. His curiosity was insatiable, but in spite of what has so frequently been asserted, usually by his enemies, although sometimes by his friends, he was not a mere theorist. He kept his feet on the ground. It was the practical application of ideas and their practical effects which appealed most to him and not the ideas in themselves as viewed by a philosopher. Even when he could not use the touchstone of experiment in such matters as his belief in the common man or religious freedom, he was never a doctrinaire. He not only believed but said over and over that government and institutions had to be suited to a people of any given time and place and could not be true or good everywhere and always.
 
We do not look to Jefferson for a theory of government or of the state. To a great extent the things he had to say about government, and the things for which he strove in his active political life, were based on the America of his day and the slowly developing agricultural one which he envisaged in the future, writing as he did, before the machine age. What gave Jefferson his profound importance in his own day, as it does now, was his view of human life. He was, and still is, the greatest and most influential American exponent of both Liberalism and Americanism.
 
Liberalism is rather an attitude than a program. It is less a solution of governmental problems than it is a way of looking at them. It is based on the doctrine of live and le............