The clear mind of Jefferson grasped these bonds of industrial interest between the southern planter and northern farmer—the slaveholder of the South and the laborer of the North—at a very early period, and declared them “natural allies” in the great conflict then pending. The planter or “slaveholder” of the South asked nothing from government but its protection. He had grown up under a condition of things where there was no social conflict of any kind. There were no opposing interests—no class distinctions—nothing to appeal to his selfishness or to blind his judgment. Society was _naturally_ divided, not into the rich and poor as elsewhere, but into whites and negroes, and, as the latter was owned by the former there was no contradiction, no motive or possible inducement to employ the government as an instrument for the special benefit of any body. The old European notion of government, therefore, that clung and still clings to the northern mind, that government should regulate the religion, the commerce, the industry, etc., of the country, was exploded, and the modern and true American idea that it should simply protect all alike and give favor to none became the general idea of the populations of the South; and, indeed, of the great agricultural populations of the Central States so far as it then could find expression. And, when this was the general notion of Virginia and other States at the South as regards their own legitimate government, of course they would not permit the federal and factitious government resting on delegated and strictly defined limitations of power, to be perverted in its spirit and transformed by its practice into a machine, as in England, to benefit others at their expense. The Southern States, therefore, especially Virginia and Kentucky, met in their legislatures, consulted with other States, and, in the celebrated Kentucky and Virginia resolutions of 1798, made a declaration of principles, and pledged themselves to a policy that will always serve as the true landmarks of our State and federative systems so long as the republic, or, indeed, American freedom itself lasts to bless the world and illuminate mankind. These resolutions offered a common platform for the agricultural States—for the producing classes of all sections—for the masses, the millions, in short, for all men who believed in the American idea of government and demanded equal rights for all and favors for none.