They _might_ have had, as Sir Thomas Moore and Algernon Sidney, and, indeed, men of all ages have had, feeble glimmerings of the great truth promulgated in 1776. All who belong to the race or species are created equal; and this great, fixed, and eternal fact, embedded in the physical and mental organism of the race, has always been dimly perceived, but without juxtaposition with a different race, without the actual presence of the negro, without the constant daily perception of those natural distinctions that separate races, in contrast with the artificial distinctions of classes of their own race, neither Jefferson nor any one else could have risen to the level of the grand truth embodied in the Declaration of Independence. They _might_ have been distinguished actors in the great drama of independence, but that, as an historical event, would not have differed from a score of similar events where one people or portion of a people have separated and set up an independent government. The overthrow of the Moorish dominion in Spain—of the rule of the Spaniards in Holland—and the recent independence of Belgium, are parallel events, and many others might be named where foreign dominion has been overthrown and new governments set up without resulting in any change or progress of ideas, or without working out any fundamental revolution in human affairs. And if Jefferson, Madison, and their associates had had the same mental habits as Hamilton, Adams, and others of the North, it is obvious that independence would not have been accompanied by a revolution in ideas. As has been said, a more liberal system than that of the mother country would have been established, but a new system, a radical and fundamental change in the political order—a new starting-point in the progress of the race—a government founded on the universal equality of the citizenship as actually established, it is obvious would have been impossible. And as the public men of a country can never rise above the level of the average opinion or the ordinary mental habits of the people, it is equally obvious that Jefferson and his associates would never have done so, and therefore, if there had not been a condition of things that gave origin to new ideas and new habits of thought in the people of Virginia and elsewhere where these widely different social elements were in juxtaposition, then it is equally obvious that the world would never have heard of them in 1776, and whatever time and circumstances might have brought about in the future, no _revolution_ at that time would have been possible.