And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath?... It is impossible to be temperate and to pursue this subject through the various considerations of policy, of morals, of history natural and civil. But it does not ensue that Negroes should ever be placed on a footing of equality with the whites. To pronounce that they are decidedly inferior would require long observation, and we must hesitate to degrade a whole race of men from the work in the scale of beings which their Creator may _perhaps_ have given them.... I advance it therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstance, are inferior to the whites in the endowment both of body and mind. It is not against experience to suppose that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different qualifications. Will not a lover of natural history then, one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of man as distinct as nature has formed them. However the case may be, the blacks cannot be incorporated into the State, and the only solution after they are emancipated and educated is to "colonize them to such places as the circumstances of the time shall render most proper, sending them out with arms, implements of household and of the handicraft arts, seeds, pairs of the useful animals, etc., to declare them a free and independent people, and extend to them our alliance and protection, till they shall have acquired strength." But the freed slave "is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture", and the purity of the white stock must be preserved. Throughout the book Jefferson untiringly harps on the fact that American civilization is different from any other that has developed in Europe, and that principles of "economy" which apply to European nations should not be transferred "without calculating the difference of circumstance which should often produce a difference of results." The main difference lies in the fact that while in Europe "the lands are already cultivated, or locked up against the cultivator, we have an immensity of land courting the industry of the husbandman." America is essentially agricultural, and agricultural it must remain: