Background and Context
An old man is asked to write something to a baby. The child has been named after him by a friend, the friend would like a keepsake with some use in it, and the man is eighty-one and has fewer than eighteen months to live.
What he sends is three things, and the division between them is the most useful fact about the document. There is a covering letter, which opens by observing that it will reach the boy as a letter from the dead, and which does name virtues, plainly and in the imperative — adore God, cherish your parents, love your neighbour as yourself and your country more than yourself, be just, be true. There is a poem, headed as the portrait of a good man and offered for imitation. And then, separately, under its own heading, there are ten numbered sentences that do none of that.
He had been working on those ten for somewhere between fourteen and twenty years by then, in more than one version, for more than one young person, adding and dropping and rewording. This is a document that had been sifted. It is also, at that length and on that occasion, the last practical counsel he had to give — not the moral part, which travelled in the letter and the poem, but the residue he judged portable enough to hand to someone who would have to use it without him.
Interpretation
Ten items, and not one of them names a virtue.
Ordinarily that would be a thin observation, since plenty of practical lists are silent about goodness for no reason worth discussing. What makes it evidence here is that Jefferson had just finished naming virtues, in the same mailing, an inch further up the page — be just, be true, love your neighbour — and then stopped, drew a heading, and began a different document under it. Whatever the canons are, they were composed as the thing that goes after the moral instruction, by a man who had demonstrably not run out of moral instruction. Inside their own boundary there is no honesty, no justice, no courage, no generosity, no piety, and no duty; there are ten sentences about money, food, temper, and time.
The list has three movements, and they are doing three different jobs.
The first four items are prohibitions, all of them opening on the same word. Never put off, never trouble another, never spend ahead, never buy what you do not want. Two concern effort and two concern money, and each names one specific, extremely common, entirely recognizable error. Only the fourth bothers to explain itself — it will be dear to you — and the explanation it gives is mechanical: the cheap thing costs you later, in a currency you were not tracking at purchase.
Items five through eight stop instructing altogether. They are observations. Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst and cold asserts a comparison of magnitudes. We never repent of having eaten too little claims that a particular regret is reliably absent. Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly locates difficulty somewhere unexpected — in the unwillingness rather than in the work, which if true means that most of what people describe as hard is a report about their own consent. And How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened is an exclamation about anticipatory suffering, aimed at the largest single category of distress most people carry. Four sentences in a row containing no imperative at all. They tell a child how minds behave.
The last two are techniques, and they share a structure. Take things always by their smooth handle says that a situation, like a pot, offers more than one aspect to grasp, and that which one you take is up to you. When angry, count ten, before you speak; if very angry, an hundred is a procedure with a dial on it. Neither of these is a virtue and neither is even advice about character. Both insert an interval — a gap between what has happened and what you do about it — and both are indifferent to what kind of person is using them.
Forbid four errors, describe four mechanisms, supply two procedures. Then stop.
The absence of any named good is the document's actual claim, and it is a strong one. It treats character as a problem of avoiding a small set of well-attested failures instead of pursuing an ideal, and the reasoning behind that is visible in the items themselves. Look at what the four prohibitions have in common: each names an act that is pleasant at the moment of commission and costly later, and each is therefore a mistake a person makes while feeling perfectly reasonable. Deferral, imposition, spending ahead, buying cheap — nobody does these while thinking they are doing wrong. That is a specifiable class, and it is small, because the number of ways a sensible person can be talked into a bad trade by his own comfort turns out to be short and to repeat across lives.
Coming out well has no such structure. It varies by the person, it is only legible in retrospect, and any attempt to compress it into ten numbered lines produces something that sounds admirable and instructs nobody — which is exactly what the covering letter's virtues do, and precisely why they are in the covering letter and not here.
The cost of that choice is real and the list does not acknowledge it. Everything here can be fully satisfied by a man who has done nothing whatever — who never wasted a day, never asked for help, never carried debt, kept his temper, and lived a life of no consequence to anyone. The canons describe a floor with great precision and decline to say anything about what is built on it.
Current Relevance
Almost every institution that governs conduct at scale has ended up writing Jefferson's kind of document, and most of them did not intend to.
A professional code of ethics, a corporate code of conduct, an academic integrity policy, a medical licensing board's standards: each rests its enforceable weight on a list of prohibited acts, arrived at independently and under pressure, because a body that has to sanction somebody who disagrees with the sanction needs a clause it can point at.
What the canons illuminate is less the drafting problem than what an enumeration does to the person living under it, and here Jefferson's boy and a first-year associate are in the same position. A list of specified failures is a map of consequences, and people read maps of consequences the way water reads ground. If the only thing that can be held against you is a listed breach, then the skill the document actually teaches is fluency in the list — where its edges are, what falls outside it, which conduct is unlovely and unlisted. That competence is real, it is learnable, and it is not integrity. It is closer to a working knowledge of one's own exposure, and it is available in equal measure to the scrupulous and the predatory, which is why a well-drafted code so reliably fails against exactly the person it was drafted after.
Jefferson's list has the same property and is unusually honest about it, because the ten are so plainly a floor that nobody could mistake them for a portrait. Compliance regimes obscure this by bolting on a statement of values, which nothing then enforces — and the effect of the bolted-on half is worse than absence, since a reader who notices that one half carries consequences and the other does not has been taught something quite specific about the institution's real preferences.
Which leaves the question the canons pose still open, in the shape it had in 1825. An enumeration of failures is the only part of a conduct standard that functions, it teaches the governed to become expert in their own boundaries, and it is demonstrably not what anybody wanted to produce. Jefferson evidently thought a boy who kept these ten would come out all right. He had also, in the same mailing, taken the trouble to send the boy a poem about what a good man looks like.
Impact and Legacy
The list had a working life. Through the middle decades of the nineteenth century it was reprinted in American farm journals and general-interest papers as practical instruction, sitting alongside crop advice, and by 1878 a Chicago newspaper thought it familiar enough to run a parody of — which is a better index of circulation than any reprint count, since a joke only lands if the audience already has the original.
Its more durable legacy belongs to the form it sits in. The canons are one instance of a genre with a long history: the set of rules an old man hands a young one at the moment the young one is being launched — Polonius to Laertes, Chesterfield to his son, the letter to a godson opened on a later birthday. What Jefferson's contributes to that form is its refusal to say anything elevated, and the refusal is unusual enough in the genre to be its signature.
That signature has also proved to be the part of the list a later hand will reach for. At least one line of transmission — the one that reached this collection — keeps Jefferson's first six items and replaces his last four with four sentences from a twentieth-century inspirational creed. What comes out is the descriptive middle and one of the two techniques; what goes in is four aspirational imperatives about how to be. It is worth being precise about the scale of this. The genuine ten remain the standard published form, and the hybrid appears to be a minor, undocumented variant with a small readership. What makes it interesting is not its reach but its direction. Somebody holding Jefferson's list judged the back third of it insufficient and supplied exactly the register he had declined to write in, producing a document that tells a reader how to feel about his own life — which the original, at no point and by evident design, does.
Contrasting Views or Controversies
The most serious charge against the canons is that a purely avoidant programme produces avoidant people. Nothing here asks the reader to attempt anything. Aristotle's objection would be that virtue is an activity, that the courageous man is identified by what he does under fear and never by a list of things he refrained from, and that a training regime consisting entirely of prohibitions will produce someone careful, solvent, punctual, and unremarkable.
Before that charge can land, though, it has to get past a prior one that would dissolve it — the suspicion that there is no programme here to object to. Most of these maxims were not Jefferson's composition. He collected and arranged them, and a proverb stock is short of abstract nouns by nature, since proverbs deal in concrete things: money, food, tempers, handles. On that account the architecture described above is simply what anyone gets who assembles a list from that material, the absence of virtues is a property of the genre, and Aristotle would be complaining about proverbs in general rather than about anything Jefferson did.
What settles it is the traffic in and out of the list. Three items left the twelve at one point or another, and they did not leave together. Take care of your cents: Dollars will take care of themselves went in 1817 and never returned. Nothing is troublesome that one does willingly also went in 1817 — and then came back in 1825, restored to a list it had already been cut from. Think as you please, and so let others, and you will have no disputes survived the first cut and was removed only at the last.
Every one of those three is as concrete as anything that stayed; the first is the most purely practical sentence in the whole set. So whatever Jefferson was selecting against across those years, it was not abstraction — and a man who takes a sentence out, leaves it out for eight years, and then puts it back is not letting a proverb stock settle. He is deciding, repeatedly, and changing his mind. The surviving ten are a choice, and that hands Aristotle his objection back with its teeth in: the silence about what the floor is for was made and remade by someone who kept reopening the question, and the list still has no answer to him. A second objection is to item two, and it sharpens with use. Never trouble another for what you can do yourself, taken as written, is a rule against asking for help. As counsel to a particular boy of a particular class, with resources and prospects, it reads as self-reliance and is probably good for him. Generalised, it corrodes the thing that actually carries people through difficulty, which is a standing willingness to be a nuisance to somebody and to have somebody be a nuisance to you. A community in which everyone observed item two strictly would be composed of people who all coped alone and none of whom knew each other.
There is also a plain problem with item six. We never repent of having eaten too little is false, conspicuously so, for anyone who has ever eaten too little without choosing to. The trouble is the we. An observation that holds only where eating lightly is elective has been stated as a fact about everybody, and the universal register is doing the work of hiding the condition the claim depends on — which is exactly the failure mode of the descriptive middle generally, since a description offered in that register cannot be checked by the reader against a situation it was never true of.
Practical Application
- For an individual writing rules for themselves: sort the draft into Jefferson's three kinds before keeping any of it, because the three are used differently and mixing them is what makes a personal code quietly stop working. Prohibitions are commitments: you either kept them this week or you did not, and the record is checkable. Observations are predictions about how you actually behave, and the right operation on them is testing — hold how much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened against a list of the things you dreaded last year and see what the hit rate was. Techniques are procedures, and they either fit the shape of your day or they do not. Most self-written codes fail at the middle kind, because a person resolves to obey a description, finds there is nothing to obey, and concludes the whole list was sentimental.
- For a parent, teacher, or anyone asked for advice: establish the deadline before you answer, because it silently determines the form. Jefferson's canons were commissioned for a reader who would not be able to use them for many years and whom he would never meet, and a request with that horizon has one honest answer: general, portable, and short. A request with a horizon of Tuesday has a different one, and the test for which you are facing is simple — ask whether the person can come back and tell you it did not work. If they can, you are in a conversation and should behave like it. If they cannot, everything you write has to stand up unattended, and the material that does is much thinner than most people expect. Reaching for the durable form when the person in front of you wanted the other one is the commonest way advice goes wrong, and it reads to the recipient as a door closing.
- For an organisation drafting a code of conduct: enumerate the failures, because in practice that will be the only part anyone can enforce, and then state plainly in the document that the enumeration is a floor and name what the standard above it is. The failure mode is not having an aspirational section; it is having one that is never referenced in any decision, which teaches every reader that the prohibitions are the real document and the rest is decoration. If nothing in your promotion, hiring, or review process ever turns on the positive half, it is not part of the code.
- For a reader meeting a list of maxims in circulation: check the back half against a source. The opening items are what people remember and repeat, and the tail is where material gets quietly swapped, because an ending that sounds like an ending draws no attention to itself. That is precisely what happened to this list.
Background on the Author
Thomas Jefferson kept commonplace books from adolescence — blank volumes into which he copied passages worth having, a standard discipline of eighteenth-century education that most people abandoned after school and that he did not. He filled one with law, another with literature and philosophy, and went on collecting other people's sentences for decades. The habit produces a specific competence, and the competence is curatorial: the practised judgment of a man who has spent his life deciding, thousands of times over, which formulations are worth the ink and which are merely agreeable.
The canons are the output of that competence. Most of the ten were not his invention, and the arrangement was; what he supplied was the selection, made repeatedly across at least three versions sent to three different young people over fourteen to twenty years. The count was cut once, a dozen to ten, and then held; but the membership kept moving under it, with one item dropped in 1817 and restored in 1825 and another surviving that first cut only to be removed at the last. The wording went on tightening through every pass.
Which locates the document's authority in the length and seriousness of the comparison. Each surviving sentence had been held up against alternatives for well over a decade by someone unusually practised at that act, and had gone on surviving. Jefferson never offered the canons as original and never offered them as a philosophy. They are a curator's testimony, and reading them as one accounts for the feature that otherwise looks like a gap — a curator exhibits, and has no occasion to argue.