THE WRITINGS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON Library Edition CONTAINING HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY, NOTES ON VIRGINIA, PARLIA- PUBLISHED IN THEIR ENTIRETY FOR THE FIRST TIME INCLUDING ALL OF THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPTS, depositED IN THE DEPARTMENT OF STATE AND PUBLISHED IN 1853 BY ORDER OF THE JEFFERSON'S CONTRIBUTION TO A FREE PRESS. Perhaps the strongest utterance of faith in the power of a free, honest and liberty-loving press, made by man, was Jefferson's declaration: "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." Was this too high praise of newspapers? History furnishes the answer: it was the press and the printed letters of Payne, Jefferson, Madison, Adams and others, read in every nook and corner of the colonies, which aroused the people of America to secure independence, rather than the thrilling eloquence of the Patrick Henrys, heard by small audiences; and almost every right won for the people since Guttenberg has owed its success to the agitation, argument and exhortation of newspaper and pamphlet. Indeed, but for the invention of the art of printing and its wise use by men like Jefferson, who were devoted to liberty, the floodtide of freedom would have been centuries later in reaching the shores of the New World. In a letter from Paris on Shays's Rebellion, which shows that VOL. XVIII-A he was decades ahead of his time, Jefferson gave expression to his high estimate of the value of newspapers as moulders of sound public opinion. He wrote: "The people are the only censors of their governors; and even their errors will tend to keep them to the true principles of their institution. To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty. The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs, through the channel of public papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide, whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers, and be capable of reading them." In 1786, to Dr. James Currie, he wrote: “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press and that cannot be limited without being lost." In 1808, in answer to an address, he wrote: "The liberty of speaking and writing guards our other liberties." To General Washington, in 1792, he wrote: "No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free, no one ever will." Mr. Jefferson, more than any man of his day, appreciated the mighty power of the printed page. Indeed it may be doubted whether any man of any age appreciated so truly its capacity to create public sentiment. He more than any of his famous contemporaries understood that the man imbibes what he reads more than what he hears. But more and better than that: he recognized the priceless value of a free press, just as he felt the necessity of freedom to worship God without restraint. Freedom was to him a religion. He hated anything that hindered man's liberty to think, to write, to speak, to do. His life was largely given to unfettering the mind of man. "I have sworn," he wrote, "upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” 66 The statute for religious liberty, drawn by him and enacted by the Virginia Assembly, was the first step in the line of carrying out the oath he had taken upon the altar. His whole life shows that he was never "disobedient to the heavenly vision" which inspired that oath. He deemed it one of the three achievements of his life worthy to be carved on the granite shaft, which he directed to be placed above his grave. He acquired his deep-seated hostility to religious bigotry and to church establishment(nearly always twin brothers)—when he saw dissenting preachers carried to jail for what Patrick Henry called "the crime of preaching the gospel." The sense of outrage that a man should be impris |