Obligation of intellectuals to be intelligent

When wandering around Monticello one 103°-day during the long-to-be-remembered summer of 1978, your Managing Editor came across this Independence Day Address given to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation on 4 July 1974. Lamenting that she had not found it in time to include it in the Applied Optics Bicentennial issue, she would still like to share it with you as the sentiments are timeless. This essay is reprinted here by permission; it was included in TRADITION AND THE FOUNDING FATHERS by Louis B. Wright (University Press of Virginia, 1975).