Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 6.djvu/30

24 wards. I consider the continuance of republican government as absolutely hanging on these two hooks."

His darling project, however, after being relieved of official cares, was the building up of a "real state university." "For at least fifty years," says Thomas Nelson Page, "Jefferson had the [university] project in his brain; . . . for at least twenty years he gave to its fulfilment every energy which he possessed. Every resource he could summon was called forth." While he had not attained his ideal in the matter of elementary education and primary political divisions, he felt that the people were devoted to their institutions and their liberties were for the time safe; he proposed, therefore, to promote the establishment of "an institution in which all the useful sciences could be cultivated in the highest degree." The nation's grandest resource was in the genius of its youth, and he would foster that; and we must not get the idea that outside of politics Jefferson was a narrow, impractical, scholastic visionary. He invented the first scientific plow, imported the first threshing machine into Virginia, was ever in the lead in introducing improved varieties of economic plants and more highly bred sheep and cattle.

He knew that "science is more important in a republican than in any other government." He was content with nothing less than preeminence for his country and believed, as his life devotion proves, that the agency of a real university, with the best men the world afforded in it, was an indispensable prerequisite for this preeminence. "Fame, fortune, and prosperity" it would insure the country, and Virginia, using its graduates of superior qualifications, would be raised "from its humble state to an eminence among its associates which it has never known; no, not in its brightest days." Virginia has just this last year been fully awakened to the absolute truth of Jefferson's teachings. Educational agencies of local communi-