The great revolutionary movement of 1776 gave full expression to the new modes of thought, the grand ideas, the glorious truths thus developed in the mind of Virginia, and relatively in the other colonies, where this _cause_, this negro element had anything like a stationary existence. It was no accident or chance that made Mr. Jefferson the author of the great idea, or rather the exponent of the idea embodied in the Declaration of Independence, the grand and immortal truth, that all white men are created equal, and therefore entitled to equal rights, or, as he expressed it, to “life, liberty, and happiness.” True, some other Virginian might have done this, and possibly some mind in the Middle Provinces, New Jersey, or New York, might have formed a tolerably clear conception of this great fixed and unchangeable truth that underlies the whole superstructure of our political society; but no man in the Northern Provinces could have risen to this mental elevation at that period in our history; indeed comparatively few are even now capable of it. Massachusetts and the neighboring colonies grasped the idea of independence with great clearness, and urged it with an earnestness, bravery, and indomitable perseverance certainly unsurpassed, if equalled elsewhere, but it was independence of a foreign dominion, and not independence of foreign ideas or of a hostile system. They were without negroes, without any natural substratum in the social elements, without any test or standard to determine men’s natural relations to each other, and clinging to the mental habits of their British ancestors, they were therefore incapable of forming those grand and truthful conceptions of equality which Mr. Jefferson, and Virginians generally, under the influences that have been stated, so clearly apprehended. The accidental and artificial distinctions of society—family influence, wealth, education, etc., were as in England, though, of course, not to the same extent—the standards, the tests, the landmarks of the political as well as the social order, and the phrase often used by New England writers of our own day, that “representation was inseparable from taxation,” fully expressed the mental habits and imperfect political conceptions of the Northern mind. In England, except the titled aristocracy, the House of Lords or Peerage, which pretends to rest on blood or birth (?), wealth alone gives rights. The _man_ is nowhere, no part or portion, or element even of the political system. In every county where he happens to have property, he has a vote, but if without property, he has no voice whatever, and, as observed, is not even an element of representation, as are the negroes of the South. Taxation and representation, therefore, are inseparable, so far as forms are concerned, in the British system, though, as a fact, it is the working classes, who are not represented at all, that must pay all the taxes in the end. The mental habits of the