Everything is there! That America is essentially and should remain an Anglo-Saxon civilization; the fear that unassimilated immigration may corrupt the institutions of the country and bring into it uneradicable germs of absolutism; the admission even that America needs a certain class of immigrants, of specialists to develop new arts and new industries. In 1781, Jefferson was not only an American, but a hundred per cent. American, and the sentiments he expressed then were to reëcho in the halls of Congress through the following generations whenever the question was discussed. The government as it was presently organized was far from perfect--it even had "very capital defects in it." First of all, it was not a truly representative government since, owing to the representation by counties, it happened that fourteen thousand men living in one part of the country gave law to upwards of thirty thousand living in another; in spite of the theoretical separation of powers, all the powers of government, legislature, executive, and judiciary, were vested in the legislative body. "The concentrating these in the same hands is precisely the definition of despotic government." Assuming that the present legislators of Virginia were perfectly honest and disinterested, it would not be very long before a change might come, for "mankind soon learn to make interested uses of every right and power which they possess, or may assume." "With money we will get men," said Caesar, "and with men we will get money." ... They should look forward to a time, and that not a distant one, when a corruption in this, as in the country from which we derive our origin, will have seized the heads of the government, and be spread by them through the body of the people; when they will purchase the voices of the people, and make them pay the price. Human nature is the same in every side of the Atlantic and will be alike influenced by the same causes. The time to guard against corruptions and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold of us.