Letter writing:.............................

.................................a lost art, and we are all the poorer for it.

     "Seven o'clock, and retired to my fireside.  I have determined to enter into conversation with you."  Jefferson began one letter to Madison in October 1785.   Distance did not lessen their intimacy:  Jefferson wanted his far-off friend to hear his voice;  he wanted to see his friend listening.  Something had upset the American abroad, and he needed to hash it out.   Jefferson was in Fountainebleau, a town forty miles from Paris where the king of France hunted, and where the court attended him when he did so.  Jefferson had gone for a walk, "to take a view of the place," and had fallen into conversation with a woman laborer who showed him a hillside path.  She told Jefferson she had two children (she made no mention of a husband) and she earned eight sous, or four pennies, a day—when she could find work, which was not always.  As she and Jefferson parted ways, he gave her twenty-four sous, at which she burst into tears.  "She probably never before received so great an aid."  This led Jefferson into "a train of reflections" on the cause of his guide's plight—the unequal distribution of property.
     "The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on.  If for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated"—that is owned by individuals—"we must take care that other employment be provided to those" who own no land at all.  "If we do not, the fundamental right to labor the earth returns to the unemployed."  How would Jefferson encourage a distribution of property that would not leave his guide weeping over a twenty-four sous tip?  He made two suggestions:  abolishing feudal forms of inheritance that steered an estate to one heir, and progressive taxation.  Abolishing feudal forms was advice aimed at France, Virginia had already abolished primogeniture and thus, Jefferson believed, mammoth estates like the king's at Fountainebleau.  But Jefferson's letter implied two more radical ideas.  Property is only a secondary right, since society allows it "for the encouragement of industry," and the right to earn a living—"to labor the earth"—precedes it.  Such thoughts would call all Virginian, and American, society into question.   Jefferson was grappling with a deep political subject—the intersection of work and rights—and he sent his thoughts to Madison because Madison was smart enough to follow them, and bold enough not to dismiss him out of hand.

-Richard Brookhiser,  James Madison