legislative, executive, and judiciary departments.... Our situation is indeed perilous, and I hope my countrymen will be sensible of it, and will apply, at a proper season, the proper remedy; which is a convention to fix the constitution, to amend its defects, to bind up the several branches of government by certain laws, which, when they transgress, their acts shall become nullities; to render unnecessary an appeal to the people, or in other words a rebellion, on every infraction of their rights, on the peril that their acquiescence shall be construed into an intention to surrender those rights. This is much more than an occasional outburst written under a strong emotional stress. Jefferson had discovered in his own country the existence of a group of men stanchly opposed to the republican form of government, ready in an emergency to go beyond the powers that had been delegated to them--not necessarily dishonest men, but dangerous because they did not have a correct conception of their rights and duties. All the controversy with the Federalists already exists in germ, in this declaration, and Jefferson from the very first had taken his position. The immediate effect was to sever the last bonds which still tied him to the aristocratic spirit of the social class to which he belonged by birth, and to make him raise a protest against the fact that, "the majority of men in the state, who pay and fight for its support are unrepresented in the legislature, the roll of freeholders entitled to vote, not including generally the half of those on the roll of militia, or of the tax gatherers." "It has been thought that corruption is restrained by confining the right of suffrage to a few of the wealthier people"; but experience has shown, irrespective of any consideration of justice or right, that a truly republican form of government is not safe in their hands. What will be the conclusion? That suffrage must be extended so as to become universal. The people themselves are the only safe depositories of government. "If every individual which composes this mass participates of the ultimate authority, the government will be safe; because the corruption of the whole mass will exceed any private resources of wealth." But if the people are the ultimate guardians of their liberties, they must also be rendered the safe guardians of it. Hence the necessity of providing for them an education adapted to the years, the capacity, and the conditions of every one, and directed toward their freedom and happiness. On this occasion Jefferson reproduced the view already expressed in the Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge, as well as the tenor of the first section of the Bill for Religious Freedom, but with new considerations which could scarcely be incorporated in a statute.