Today's Economic History: The Pace of Innovation in the Eighteenth Century--and Political Uproar
Jefferson to Adams 11 January 1816:
I agree with you… on the 18th century. It certainly witnessed the sciences and arts, manners and morals, advanced to a higher degree than the world had ever before seen.…
How then has it happened that these nations, France especially and England, so great, so dignified, so distinguished by science and the arts, plunged at once into all the depths of human enormity, threw off suddenly and openly all the restraints of morality, all sensation to character, and unblushingly avowed and acted on the principle that power was right?… Was it from the terror of monarchs alarmed at the light returning on them from the West and kindling a volcano under their thrones? Was it a combination to extinguish that light and to bring back, as their best auxiliaries, those enumerated by you: the Sorbonne, the Inquisition, the Index Expurgatorius, and the Knights of Loyola? Whatever it was, the close of the century saw the moral world thrown back again to the age of the Borgias, to the point from which it had departed 300 years before.…
Your prophecies… proved truer than mine; and yet fell short of the fact.… But altho’ your prophecy has proved true so far, I hope it does not preclude a better final result. That same light from our West seems to have spread and illuminated the very engines employed to extinguish it. It has given them a glimmering of their rights and their power. The idea of representative government has taken root and growth among them. Their masters feel it and are saving themselves by timely offers of this modification of their own powers. Belgium, Prussia, Poland, Lombardy, etc. are now offered a representative organization: illusive probably at first, but it will grow into power in the end.… Even France will yet attain representative government… altho’ rivers of blood may yet flow between them and their object.
