Thomas Jefferson's Notes on Customs and Manners

This post consists almost entirely of an excerpt from Thomas Jefferson's Notes on Virginia. I am quoting this today because of the eloquence of the writing, the obvious intelligence of this early President and because I believe the import of its message has a bearing on the U.S. of now. Although the excerpt deals with the bad effects of slavery, there is a resonance with now. For indeed, do we not now have a kind of economic slavery in which people must work in order to obtain health care? Is it not a kind of slavery to be only one paycheck away from starvation? Here, then, is the excerpt:

From Thomas Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, the section entitled The Particular Customs and Manners That May Happen to Be Received in That State

It is difficult to determine on the standard by which the manners of a nation may be tried, whether catholic or particular. It is more difficult for a native to bring to that standard the manners of his own nation, familiarized to him by habit. There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotisms on the one part and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him....if a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in which he is born to live and labor for another; in which he must lock up the faculties of his nature, contribute as far as depends on his individual endeavors to the evanishment of the human race, or entail his own miserable condition on the endless generations proceeding from him. With the morals of the people, their industry also is destroyed. For in a warm climate, no man will labor for himself who can make another labor for him.