To Cyril Coniston Clemens
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. May 20, 1950
The American Revolution although more than twenty years earlier than the French was not at all the source of the French; but that Jefferson, whose views were very radical and who disliked the British good sense of the American Constitution was a Jacobin with Arcadian notions of democracy in idyllic villages with thatched roofs and Cincinnatus returning from the corrupting influence of even one year of power to sweat virtue at the plough.
I don’t think “ideologies” particularly worth studying, but it is instructive to contrast the pictures they paint of the ideal with the facts. Humanitarians have an intense hatred of mankind as it is. Jefferson says somewhere in this little book—I wish I could quote the passage verbatim, but I can’t find it—that he would like to exterminate all non-democrats from every country, and fill them all with Americans after his own heart. This is the principle on which Stalin acts.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Eight, 1948-1952. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: William R. Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham NC