But great, and, when compared with what others may have done, immense as may be the benefits conferred by Jefferson and his associates on mankind, they only did their duty, and honestly represented the ideas and desires of their constituencies. Or, in other words, they merely expressed the opinions and reflected the mental habits that had their origin in the social condition, and followed as a necessary consequence of juxtaposition with negroes. If there had been no negroes in Virginia—no widely different race with its different capacities and different wants to provide for, in short, if there had been no natural distinctions, then those accidental and artificial things—wealth, education, family pride, etc.—which separate classes would have remained as elsewhere, the basis of political as well as social order. The descendants of English cavaliers, with their traditions and mental habits, would, perhaps, be somewhat liberalized, for their condition was widely changed from that of their ancestors, but without negroes, without the presence of natural distinctions, without those lines of demarcation fixed forever by the hand of God for society to repose upon, they would have remained the most aristocratic community in America. Neither Thomas Jefferson, nor any of the great controlling minds of the day, would have been heard of; or, at all events, would not have figured in that grand _rôle_ where history has always placed them—the authors of a new idea and the founders of a new political system.