The Thomas Jefferson Hour; #0452; Civility

Welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Hour, your weekly conversation with our third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson. The Thomas Jefferson Hour is produced by High Plains Public Radio and New Enlightenment Radio Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the search for truth in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson. Today's program was recorded in late November 2004. The topic is, civility. Please join us as our host Bill Crystal speaks with Thomas Jefferson. Welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Hour, your weekly conversation with the third president of the United States. Today Mr. Jefferson, we're going to look at civility. I know it's a topic that we have explored many times, but we are broaching it in the light of certain incidents in our society which seem to take place on an almost daily basis. One of the most recent is the so-called basket brawl where members of the Indiana Pacers got into a fight with fans. It was really a terrible sort of brawl.

Indeed, one commentator of our times is suggesting that we have perhaps become a Jacksonian people. I'm not sure he meant it quite in the sense in which I'm applying it right now. But when I say Jacksonian to you, you think of people brawling and behaving badly, do you not? Well, good day to you, citizen. Yes, when Andrew Jackson was inaugurated into the presidency in March of 1828, there was a near riot in the White House. His followers from the West were delighted to see the people's champion become the president of the United States in a war here. They flocked to the federal city, the capital, and the White House was thrown open to this reception, but people stood on the sofas and tore down the drapes and broke windows and did physical damage to the facility. People like John Quincy Adams, who of course was bitter about that election anyway, regarded this as the coming of pandemonium and anarchy to the United States. So the very name, Andrew Jackson, in my time, connoted roughanism and violence. He was a duelist. He fought a number of duels in the course of his life. He was wounded in duels.

He was a man who was so prickly about his honor that almost anything would cause him to call somebody out. Can't get much further from a Jeffersonian model, I think, than Andrew Jackson. I never struck anyone in the whole course of my life. I didn't fight, as you know, in the Revolutionary War. I never shot a gun at anybody. I did, I will say, in candor, watch a couple of times and in great horror, while slaves were whipped at Monticello for bad behavior. It troubled me. I prefer the character of the stick. But clearly, your America was a violent place. Violence was as much a part of American life in your day, I think, as it is in our day now. More probably, there was eye gouging. I mean, people would get in barfights, particularly in the south and in the west.

It was not uncommon for people to gouge out each other's eyes and ears. This was a, it was almost a recognized form of, of brawling. And we didn't have any of the, the rules of, of boxing or wrestling that have since come into those, basically barbarian arts. I lived in a very violent age, but the upper crust, the gentry, as we called them, would not have engaged in eye gouging or street brawling for the most part. But there was dueling, as you know, dueling was very common in my time. Still, a lingering echo of the ancient medieval codes of single combat and the ancient ordeals that had sort of burbled up from barbarism and antiquity. But it was on its way out. And, you know, the good sign of that is that when Aaron Burr murdered Alexander Hamilton in their duel in July of 184, he was indicted for murder, both in New York and New Jersey. He had to flee polite society. He never recovered any of his political stature after that. And he was a pariah in the United States. So this is a sign that we were beginning to realize how frivolous and stupid this is.

We don't know if most of our listeners realize it or not, but he was the sitting vice president of the United States at that time. He was the sitting vice president, and he killed a man in a duel and survived it in a certain kind of sense. He was never tried for this. He did flee the country for a number of years. It did also lead him into the southwest where he engaged in whatever, whatever Huta or attempted Huta that all was. One of the interesting ironies of this, or perhaps I've said this on some previous occasion, is that after he had killed Hamilton, he did come back as vice president for one further official act. And that was the impeachment trial of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase. Samuel Chase was a terrible man who brow beat lawyers and gave instructions to juries and was an anti-Republican who used his position on the court to denounce the democratic, the emerging democratic energies of the United States. So he was impeached by the House of Representatives and tried by the Senate and Aaron Burras, the vice president, presided over the impeachment trial and made a big thing out of it. He had special tables set up in a gallery for the ladies.

And he put on, well, I suppose what you would call one of the first show trials in the history of the United States. And one of the wits of Congress said, well, it is it is common for the judge to sit in judgment of the murderer. But it is much less common to see the murderer sit in judgment of the judge. So here was this man who just murdered a fellow presiding over the impeachment trial of a Supreme Court justice. But incidents like these aren't just limited to the dual between Burr and Hamilton. I mean, we have the famous incident that took place on the floor of the house between Roger Griswold and Matthew Lyon. You were the vice president of the United States at that time. Matthew Lyon was a congressman from Vermont who was a vicious unpleasant sort of fellow. I think he was a Republican. He was a he was a populist icon and a very unpleasant man, a man without real civility. And he and Roger Griswold, a federalist from Connecticut got into some sort of a debate, a rancorist one on the floor of the House of Representatives in 1798. This, of course, was during the quasi war.

So a period of heightened tensions in the United States. And I believe that Griswold satirized Lyon for not having served with honor during the revolution. Lyon took exception. He ran over to where Griswold was sitting and spit in his face. Griswold, then this is not funny, but it's amusing in retrospect. Griswold took up his cane and beat Lyon severely. Lyon somehow got out from under the rain of blows from Griswold's cane and got a pair of fire tongs from the House of Representatives fireplace, which were both sharp and hot. And began to menace poor Griswold with these fire tongs. And they finally were pulled apart. And I believe the House of Representatives passed a resolution asking them both to behave with more civility, and they agreed to it. John Quincy Adams was Cain, I believe.

He was Cain, and then you can find in any history of the House of Representatives that there have been a series of violent acts within the House of Representatives over the course of American history. This was the only one that occurred during my time. I was actually, as perhaps you know, the sitting vice president of the United States when this occurred. So I was presiding over the Senate. This was the House. You have an uncanny naxer for not being where bad things are happening. Well, the thing about it is that I mean, there's several ways to look at this. First of all, America has always been a violent place. The kinds of people who came here were risk takers. And there is an inherent violence in American life. My father surveyed parts of Western Virginia, and there were bears and Indians and frontier ruffians, you know, pick pockets and cut purses and thieves and bandits. And so anybody in the United States in my time had to at least face the possibility of having to defend himself from armed robbery or from roughianism. We did not have the police system, street lighting, paved roads, the kind of clearances that are routine in your world that to protect people from this sort of thing. And so this was just part of American life. And furthermore, we were resting the land from Indians. And that not only created violent incidents, but it brought out some of the worst characteristics in the pioneers, the white pioneers who were out in that district.

The white pioneers are, as I put it in a letter, and I don't mean any disrespect, but they are semi-barberists themselves frequently. And this kind of violence brings out that characteristic in them. So we lived in quite a violent time, and everyone knew how to shoot a gun, and everyone had seen brawls and pubs, and dueling was still quite common. And furthermore, so that's one way to look at this. And then also in 1798 when Lion and Griswold got into their difficulties on the floor of the House of Representatives. It was a period of great international tension. We were basically fighting a cold war against France. Passions ran high. We believed that the future of human liberty was at stake. So these were not polite debates. These were debates for what we considered the soul of the future of this country. And that tended to bring out a certain rankerousness that might not have been present and say a routine debate on the floor of the House about tariffs or taxation or road building. And yet, let me ask you, Mr. Jefferson, I know your friend John Adams believed that education and religion, he thought those two would help to create a virtue within people, within the body politic.

And you yourself believed that education was certainly the way that civilization would most clearly take root, that virtue would exist in the human mind, and perhaps even in the human heart. Does it surprise you to hear incidents about the basket brawl and Senator Zell Miller saying he's sorry to a newsman that dueling has been outlawed and yelling at him to get out of his face? Does this sort of thing surprise you that it's happening so far in the future? Yes, of course, it surprises and disappoints me. John Adams, I think, where he here would say that this is human nature, and you can educate as much as you please, and you can have all the restraining mechanisms you like, but that this is just a fact of human nature and from time to time things break forth. I would disagree with that. I think that humans are essentially born good and capable of indefinite perfectability, but it does require several things, first of all education.

Unless we educate people up to their capacity, we can't expect them to rise above these forms of pettiness and animalism. Secondly, we have to agree to a social compact, a certain code of civility, and even when provoked as I frequently was, and I know John Adams frequently was, it's in our interest as believers in the Commonwealth, believers in civilization to tolerate abuse. In other words, not to be prickly about our honor, and John Adams never fought a duel. I never fought a duel. Both of us had chances to fight them, but both of us realized how silly all of this was, and so a civilized man is the one who yields first. And it seems to me that you can't have a republic if there isn't a very high level of civility. And if it's not modeled by the people at the top, the people most visible in public life, then how can we expect mere frontiersmen living in log huts to rise to these same standards? It doesn't surprise me that there are still outbreaks of civil violence in your time, but it depresses me because it means that you're probably not educating sufficiently, and you probably, and this is, I think, the greatest difference between my time and yours, you seem no longer to have a common code of civility.

In our time, at least we had a common code of civility, as I've said before on this program, people basically behaved as if they were living in a Jane Austen novel, a high level of deference, politeness, euphemism, no direct confrontations, none of what you would in your time summarized by the vulgar phrase in your facism. There was a level of gentlemanly behavior that characterized polite society, and people who broke that code like Aaron Burr were shunned. They became, in a sense, social outcasts. So we had this code. We all agreed upon it. We didn't always rise to it, but we agreed on this code, at least in the upper echelons of our society. I don't know what the people living on the natures, trace, and Tennessee might have thought, but gentlemen and gentle ladies were committed to this code of civility, and we all, I believe, every enlightened being has to bend over backwards to be civil all of the time if we want to live in a civil society. It comes, in a sense, back to Christ, turn the other cheek.

Well, and you had a doctrine, which I find wonderfully worthy of imitating. You talked about artificial good humor. I did, indeed. I believe that some of us are born polite. I think that in the best of all possible worlds, all of us would be born polite. In other words, if we can reform our social institutions and have a long period of stability, then probably we can wear off the roughnesses of human nature, and they'll turn out to be cultural rather than inherent. But for the moment, there are two types of people, those who are born polite, and I regard myself essentially as one of them. I would say that John Adams was less polite, but that he committed himself to what I call artificial good humor, which is to behave politely in the face of provocation. To adopt it as a sort of automatic response, no matter what bad thing has been said to you or done to you, to respond always as if you were unruffled and politely and generously. And I said to my grandson that if you will take on this habit of what might be called artificial good humor, even when you don't feel it, still behave as if you were a good human man.

This will have several benefits. And first of all, in the long run, it'll become a habit that's second nature, and so it's almost as good as the real thing. And secondly, it disarms these situations. The other person frequently walks away shaking his head because he hoped for a fight and he couldn't get one. And third, it models the kind of civil generosity that we wish for in a republic, and so it invites people who are watching, including the antagonist, to adopt that same method in his own world. I do believe that artificial good humor is the key to social happiness. It certainly was the key to my social happiness. As I said, it's a wonderful, wonderful concept. Mr. Jefferson, I think perhaps part of the problem found in the United States today is that we are so thorough going a Hamiltonian world, and we are a world in which sport is a big part of public life, public entertainment. Big business, sport, and films, entertainment, music. Many of the artists, many of the athletes are violent people.

They're incredibly well-paid, violent people. And unfortunately, they practice violence as an outgrowth, not simply of their professional lives, but of their everyday lives. I guess what I'm trying to say, and I think there's no kind way to do it, they're not good role models. Indeed they aren't. There's a great deal to say about that. First of all, as you know, I'm on record as saying that games that involve violence and a ball are not conducive to character building. In other words, there's something inherently ill-liberal and uncivil about a ball game, a football game, a baseball game, a basketball game, games that involve violence and a ball are automatically, in my opinion, corrosive of the kinds of civil exchanges that we want in a polite society. In other words, if you're going to have basketball or football, there are going to be brawls.

If you put people in this sort of proximity to each other who live at a high level of physical acumen and who have a deeply competitive spirit, and that part of the rule of the game is jostling as it is both in your basketball and hockey and football, then there will be brawls. And when the crowd sees these, they in a certain sense are liberated to behave in the same fashion. So there's a certain gladiatorial nature to this. This is how the games and the Coliseums and the Roman Empire worked. That one way to whip up the martial spirit, the military spirit in Rome was to have these games, lions attacking Christians, gladiators fighting single disputes against each other. And this then, in a sense, trained the Roman people for a culture of violence. So there is that. Third, and I didn't mention this earlier in talking about the violence in my own time, but of course we were a very alcoholic republic compared to you.

If you look at the statistics of drinking in my era, it's really astonishing how much people drank routinely. And this was in part because we didn't drink water. Water was suspect because we had no water treatment systems, but there was a great deal of alcoholism. And I said in France that the dinners in France were a huge contrast to those that I had been at in America, which frequently ended in drunken violence. A dinner party could end in a brawl because whenever you put enough alcohol into somebody, his inhibitions are reduced sufficiently that all of the liberal parts of his character will come screaming out. And as I understand it, the one place in American life where there are large collections of drunken people are at ball games, football games and basketball games, you don't see this at an opera. You don't see this at the ballet or at the theater. You don't see this at a track meet. You see this at these ball games and then there's an encouragement for people to get drunk and when they do, they misbehave.

You're listening to the Thomas Jefferson hour. Mr. Jefferson is talking about civility. We will return in just a moment. Humanity Scholar Clay Jenkinson's latest book, Becoming Jefferson's People, will be available December 20, 2004. Please call 1-800-274-1240. We will be back in just a moment. Welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson hour. Before we went to break, Mr. Jefferson was talking about civility and the lack there of in his own time.

Of course, we know where of he speaks in our own day. We have just recently experienced the basket brawl. There is a good deal of misbehavior among professional athletes and other luminaries in our society on a regular basis. Mr. Jefferson, you mentioned alcohol as a problem in your day. The fact that many of your people rank way too much. It dawns on me that it's sporting events in this country. Alcohol is prevalent as well. It's a terrible problem, apparently, in your time because if you pack 10,000 or 20,000 or 60,000 people into one space and then get them all drunk too, then there are going to be outbursts of ill behavior. Everybody knows that alcohol has a magnifying effect on illiberal qualities in the human soul. I will tell you, and I don't certainly don't mean to sound righteous about this, but I was never intoxicated in the whole course of my life. It was the age of reason. I was intoxicated by ideas, by books, by the reforms that were available in the enlightenment.

It seemed to me that we lived in the best of all possible ages. Linnaeus had given an apparatus to study plants. We understood something about the heavens, thanks to Newton and later astronomers. We were exploring the American West and trying to assimilate and analyze that data. This was one of the greatest ages in human history. I can't imagine why any rational human being would want to impair his faculties by imbibing over much in alcohol. I love wine, of course, as well as the next man. I cannot live without wine, but I would never have drunk wine to the point of impairing my ability to carry on a conversation. There are two problems at a ballgame. One is claustrophobia. If you pack 10,000 people or 100,000 people into a small space, that alone will create difficulties. We need to diffuse the population over a broad landscape to keep it happy. Anytime you crowd animals or humans, they will start to claw at each other's throats. If you add alcohol to that mix, you have an extremely volatile situation.

So my proposal to you would be that you remove alcohol from sporting events. If people really love sport, if they're there to see the elegance of the runner or the man catch a ball or throw one through a hoop, all of which, frankly, sound absurd to an 18th century man, then they should come for that purpose to appreciate that. And if alcohol is the only reason that they come, then probably this is not a healthy human activity. You're listening to the Thomas Jefferson hour, Mr. Jefferson, third president of the United States has just proposed that alcohol be banned at sporting events that people would therefore attend because they love the event that's taking place and not because they have some desire to be intoxicated on the side. And I'm sure that this is, you know, I'm speaking out of my own time and place. And I'm in a sense a T totaler and a hyper rationalist. And I'm not fond of games anyway.

I would never attend an event of the kind that you're talking about. I would attend the opera. But even there, I feel uncomfortable in the theater. I feel uncomfortable because you can't get up. You can't talk. You know, you're confined for a long periods of time in my age before there was public hygiene that there would be a strong odor in a room like that. Yet theaters in England in my time and to a certain extent in the United States, people talk through the play. There are incidents in the journal of the famous journal of James Boswell where he and some of the young bloods of his era would go to the theater in London and they would make cat calls and shout and flirt and people had sexual intercourse at the theater. So I'm not suggesting that I lived in some rarified world where there was none of this activity. My point is that I don't see why any rational being would go to a ball game anyway. But if he only would go if he were drinking, then clearly drinking is more important than than the event or the event is, you know, nobody needs alcohol to enjoy the opera. But if you need alcohol to enjoy a ball game, it probably suggests that the ball game is inherently not very interesting.

Well, let me just ask you, Mr. Jefferson, what is your idea of a sport or a game that would be acceptable walking? I proposed to my nephew that the best of all sport is either riding a horse or walking. Now, I love horses. I had the best horses that money could buy in Virginia and I was regarded as one of the better horsemen of my age. I think the greatest horsemen of my age was George Washington, which actually accounts for a fair amount of his leadership, a man who can sit on a horse in any weather and under any provocation and seem in control of that horse is going to win advocates in the public arena in Washington was a very spirited horsemen. I'm a spirited horseman. In fact, the only violence that I ever committed and this is family tradition rather than something that's truly documented, but I was said to be quite hard on my horses and if a horse were recalcitrant, I was not against beating that horse. To use the whip, I believe that a horse has to be mastered and I was not afraid to be a severe horseman when provoked, but I was a very spirited horseman, which I think gives the lie to the reports that I was somehow an effeminate man or a man who wasn't sufficiently manly or virile.

But I was a nonviolent man with respect to other human beings unlike Washington, who I think took a certain, I won't say joy, but there was, he said in his first journal, his first published journal, the journal about his time in the French and Indian War, he said there's something you exhilarating about feeling a rifle ball whistle over your head. And George III, the tyrant of England upon reading that journal said, well, he can't have had much of that experience if he still finds it exhilarating. So I think Washington didn't have a thirst for war, but he understood the glory of war in a way that I never did. And war was in our time in a sense what football is in your time. In other words, lots of ritual. It was the magnet which drew the kind of those kind of energies, the aggressive energies.

It was much more stately and almost dance like in the 18th century than it has since become. If you look at the British red coats lined up in formation, it's choreographed in a way that battle is not in the 21st or the 20th century. And so in some respects, what we did to channelize the human streak of violence and glory seeking was a stately form of warfare. And what you all do to glorify these streaks in the human character is a somewhat less stately form of athletic contest. But I don't think that many armies could survive long if they were drinking and there were no spectators to speak of, of course, in my time there were these were not gladiatorial activities. They were engagements between one army and another. I think horseback riding is excellent. Although I did say that I think maybe humanity has gone backwards thanks to the domestication of the horse because now a man will ride when he should walk and his own body is not as well kept as it might be.

Walking I think is the highest of all human sporting activities. I would propose to my nephew that he walk every afternoon to take a break in the middle of the day, even though that's somewhat inefficient from the point of view of scholarship and study. And that he carry a gun because I think a gun is heavy. It requires you have to stay present if you have a gun. A gun gives a sense of lively independence. But I would never urge him to read a book while walking or even to think about things while walking the ideal is to clear your mind while walking. Now that's not sport. I like horse racing. I like chess. Backgammon. I don't suppose these would qualify. I don't suppose you can get an audience of 50,000 for a chess match in your time. Thank you, Mr. Jefferson. Let me just ask you. I'll come right out and ask you. Do you think a society which has turned warfare into sport? Do you think a society like that where a great deal of alcohol is being consumed is going to be a violent and ill mannered society?

Yes, I believe. I know this sounds fairly dark, but I believe that for a society to flourish in law and gentility that every enlightened being needs to behave as his best self all or most of the time. It's not that I never wanted to cuff somebody or get into a dispute or even fight a duel. We all feel rage and we feel bitter when our honor is affronted. I don't know if it's an instinct, but an urge to use physical violence in place of persuasion. I don't know if this is universal, but it's certainly a part of the social mixes I observe it. So how do we avoid that? Well, artificial good humor, but also if we all agree to try to be civil and all of us work at this with some self-restraint and discipline, we might just create a civil society.

When we need to read literature, we need to be deeply versed in the humanities. I'm not against religious restraining mechanisms. They're not my favorite, but I think congregationalism and Anglicanism and Baptism and Quakerism, particularly Quakerism, have an immutile narrative effect on the rough edges of the human character. I think that all rational beings should limit their intakes of alcohol and try to stay sober. I think that our peers should reinforce that. If one of your peers is drinking and brawling, I think you should encourage him to behave more gracefully and that you should encourage him to be more sober, and that it takes everybody working at this for a civil society to occur. Nobody wants to behave so politely in a Jane Austen novel. They do because they realize what's at stake. And so I think that in your time when people routinely on the streets say the most disgusting things to each other, when friends speak to each other with vulgarity and the worst sort of cursing, when there's public disputatiousness at the highest levels of our society. I understand the Vice President on the floor of the Senate told a senator to f off. I shocked. But when this happens, if the Vice President can be quoted as saying the most vulgar and violent thing that you can say to another human being in American English, that is a disincentive for average people to behave well.

Who ought our role models to be? I mean, I think by asking you this question, I'm suggesting part of my understanding of the problem. I think many of our role models are not people who project, who promote the kinds of things you're talking about. Well, in your culture, you promote to celebrity people who are barely educated, if at all, athletes, movie stars, singers. I mean, these are not people who are characterized by deep thought and a long course of reading and reflection. And if those then become your models, ball players, actors, singers, then this is not these people, I would say, have almost nothing to say about anything that matters.

And therefore, if those become your, the magnets of public attention, then people are not attending to professors and priests and ministers and writers and philosophers, which is where the role modeling should come. And for example, in England in the early 18th century was Samuel Johnson. Now, I'm not a friend of Dr. Johnson. I think he's a literary bully in some respects, and I don't like his cultural or his social politics. But he was a man of immense learning, and he was, in a sense, the celebrity in English life in his time. And he looked down upon the actor, David Garrick, who was a friend of his from Litchfield, England, he regarded Garrick as frivolous because an actor, and this wrinkled Garrick, all of his life. But it's true that Johnson had earned his right to be a man of enormous public influence because he had spent years of his life reading books and writing them, and he wrote the English dictionary, and he was an essayist, and he culture mattered to him, and so he became an exemplar in English life.

Now, who's that exemplar in American life in the 21st century? So you think our role models ought to be well educated people. I know when we did a program on the presidency, you thought that one of the things that ought to be found in a candidate for the presidency is wide learning. Indeed, I think that- I don't think we should go out of our way to honor people who don't have a deep commitment to culture. Now, you can't stop the people from honoring what they choose. One of the paradoxes of a free society is that the people are free to do what they like, and you can't tell them what to celebrate. This is a paradox of freedom, and it's troubling, but in a sense it's also exhilarating that the people are the sovereign and the cultural exemplars and leaders don't get to talk down to them and tell them what they should find. They should find aesthetically or culturally pleasing.

So I like the freedom in it, but I would hope that our educational systems would encourage refinement. I mean, for example, if everyone who's listening to this program would attempt for the next month to behave with artificial good humor, no matter what the provocation. And if everyone who is listening to this program would agree to try to speak in complete English, full sentences, not sentence fragments, not vulgar similes or cliches, but to speak with a certain control to try to refine the use of the English language for the next month. I guarantee that everyone who does that will be delighted and satisfied with the result, and we'll find that people around them begin to listen to them more because of a certain commitment to restraint and refinement and a certain commitment to civility. And that if they do it, it will have a kind of infiltrating and ameliorating effect on other people.

A great problem in modern American life is violence within the family. How can we address violence in the family at the same time we're looking at the broader picture? The problem is alcohol, again, if you look at the statistics. If you take alcohol out of the mix, domestic violence, plummets, not to zero, but to a very low rate that alcohol, again, is one of the most significant exacerbating forces in domestic abuse. No, I'm not a believer in the temperance to the point of banning alcohol. I'm a libertarian. I believe that people have a right to imbibe what they please. But if you imbibe what you please and cane somebody on the floor at the House of Representatives, now you're arrested or at least stopped. One of the biggest problems in a free society is what government does about domestic abuse because we all, I think, agree that the household is sacrosanct and that we have the Fourth Amendment and the Third Amendment. The Third Amendment keeps us from quartering troops in people's homes without their consent and compensation. The Fourth Amendment that says there can be no illegal searches and seizures. There has to be a probable cause for a search or a seizure.

These are designed to protect the sanctity of the household and they go back in natural law to the British notion that one's home is one's castle. What one does behind the closed doors of one's home has a certain protection that is not true in the public arena on the street. If Griswold and Lyon had beaten each other to a pulp in a private home, it would be an interesting story but it probably would not rise to the attention of the public. It certainly wouldn't be a public issue. So we have to be very careful about that. On the other hand, government means nothing of it doesn't protect the innocent and a five-year-old child or a woman who's being beaten by her spouse is the innocent. If government doesn't reach out to protect those people, then it's not clear what government's function really can be. So this is one of the most dangerous and delicate areas in polite society. Generally speaking, and I know this sounds cold, but generally speaking, I favor government restraint that private matters unless they truly break out into the public arena had best be left alone unless there is such deep provocation that government has no choice. Thank you, Mr. Jefferson. You're listening to the Thomas Jefferson Hour. Mr. Jefferson has been talking about civility in his own time and today. We'll be back in just a moment.

You have been listening to the Thomas Jefferson Hour. Please stay tuned. We will be back in just a moment. Humanity Scholar Clay Jenkins' latest book, Becoming Jefferson's People, will be available December 20, 2004. Please call 1-800-274-1240. Thank you, Mr. Jefferson. Welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson Hour.

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