Although his relations with Jefferson were at this time very friendly, yet his ideas on most subjects were completely at variance with those of the latter. He visited him very often; and, after one of these occasions, jots down his opinion of his friend in his usual amusing vein: "Call on Mr. Jefferson, and sit a good while. General conversation on character and politics. I think he does not form very just estimates of character, but rather assigns too many to the humble rank of fools; whereas in life the gradations are infinite, and each individual has his peculiarities of fort and feeble:" Not a bad protest against the dangers of sweeping generalization. Another time he records his judgment of Jefferson's ideas on public matters as follows: "He and I differ in our systems of politics. He, with all the leaders of liberty here, is desirous of annihilating distinctions of order. How far such views may be right respecting mankind in general is, I think, extremely problematical. But with respect to this nation I am sure they are wrong, and cannot eventuate well."
As soon as he began to go out in Parisian society, he was struck by the closet republicanism which it had become the fashion to affect. After his first visit to Lafayette, who received him with that warmth and frank, open-handed hospitality which he always extended to Americans, Morris writes: "Lafayette is full of politics; he appears to be too republican for the genius of his country." And again, when Lafayette showed him the draft of the celebrated Declaration of Rights, he notes: "I gave him my opinions, and suggested several amendments tending to soften the high-colored expressions of freedom. It is not by sounding words that revolutions are produced." Elsewhere he writes that "the young nobility have brought themselves to an active faith in the natural equality of mankind, and spurn at everything which looks like restraint." Some of their number, however, he considered to be actuated by considerations more tangible than mere sentiment. He chronicles a dinner with some members of the National Assembly, where "one, a noble representing the _Tiers_, is so vociferous against his own order, that I am convinced he means to rise by his eloquence, and finally will, I expect, vote with the opinion of the court, let that be what it may." The sentimental humanitarians--who always form a most pernicious body, with an influence for bad hardly surpassed by that of the professionally criminal class--of course throve vigorously in an atmosphere where theories of mawkish benevolence went hand in hand with the habitual practice of vices too gross to name. Morris, in one of his letters, narrates an instance in point; at the same time showing how this excess of watery philanthropy was, like all the other movements of the French Revolution, but a violent and misguided reaction against former abuses of the opposite sort. The incident took place in Madame de Staël's salon. "The Count de Clermont Tonnerre, one of their best orators, read to us a very pathetic oration; and the object was to show that no penalties are the legal compensations for crimes or injuries: the man who is hanged, having by that event paid his debt to society, ought not to be held in dishonor; and in like manner he who has been condemned for seven years to be flogged in the galleys, should, when he has served out his apprenticeship, be received again into good company, as if nothing had happened. You smile; but observe the extreme to which the matter was carried the other way. Dishonoring thousands for the guilt of one has so shocked the public sentiment as to render this extreme fashionable. The oration was very fine, very sentimental, very pathetic, and the style harmonious. Shouts of applause and full approbation. When this was pretty well over, I told him that his speech was extremely eloquent, but that his principles were not very solid. Universal surprise!"