Jefferson’s First Inaugural: frugal government

Jefferson took the oath on March 4, 1801, in the unfinished Capitol, the first inauguration held in Washington. He spoke so quietly that most of the audience could not hear him, so the National Intelligencer printed the text that same morning. Jefferson packs his definition of good government into one sentence. The same speech carries the line about being all Republicans and all Federalists.

Where this text comes fromThe definition offered here is entirely negative. Good government is described by what it prevents and what it refrains from taking, not by anything it provides, and the sentence is built so that every clause removes a power rather than granting one. Whether or not you agree, it is a compact statement of a position that shaped American argument for two centuries. The address was delivered so quietly that most of the room could not hear it, and readers got it from a newspaper the same morning.

What you might not noticeThe compound fellow-citizens is joined by a hyphen and then followed immediately by a pair of hyphens standing in for a dash, so the passage carries three hyphen characters within a single word group. Source

What it trainsThree hyphens in 377 characters, and all three sit inside one short stretch of text: one joining a compound and two more standing side by side where a dash belongs. Typing two hyphens deliberately, immediately after a hyphenated word, with no spaces anywhere, is the specific difficulty here and almost nothing else on this shelf demands it. Five commas divide two sentences averaging thirty-one words. Three capitals, one inside a sentence.

Read the full text at the publisher: Wikisource