Thomas Jefferson on the Eve of Industrialization

     I found the smallest of this week's readings to be the most compelling.  Writing his Notes on the State of Virginia in the early 1780's, Thomas Jefferson lamented the growth of domestic industry and praised the virtues of an agricultural society: "Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth."  Jefferson consoled himself with the fact that his contemporaries still imported the vast majority of their finished goods, exhorting them to "let our work-shops remain in Europe."
    What strange sentiments, viewed two centuries hence from our nation of cities!  Yet, at the same time, Jefferson grasped instinctively the fundamental economic principle of specialization, by which an agricultural America made perfect sense:

"The political oeconomists of Europe have established it as a principle that every state should endeavour to manufacture for itself: and this principle, like many others, we transfer to America, without calculating the difference of circumstance which should often produce a difference of result. In Europe the lands are either cultivated, or locked up against the cultivator. Manufacture must therefore be resorted to of necessity not of choice, to support the surplus of their people. But we have an immensity of land courting the industry of the husbandman. Is it best then that all our citizens should be employed in its improvement, or that one half should be called off from that to exercise manufactures and handicraft arts for the other?"

      Of course, Jefferson's vision of eternal agriculture excludes countless benefits of our industrialized society--longer lives, fewer diseases, and the veritable disappearance of starvation in the United States.  Yet his obsolescent idealism strikes at something more keenly felt in the present than ever before.  As farms and families continue to disappear, we persist in a decades-long political silly season, when entire sectors of the economy are becoming wards of the state and a bevy of financial regulators, environmental regulators, and Washington potentates never cease to insist upon our moral duty to this industry or that.  Against this drumbeat, it is by turns refreshing and highly unsettling to hear the author of our Declaration of Independence insist that "The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigour. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution."