The thing that now disturbed him more than the possible victory of Adams and Pinckney was the fact that political divisions seemed to correspond to a geographical division. Not without reason had he written to Colonel Benjamin Hawkins: "those who knew us only from 1775 to 1793 can form no better idea of us than of the inhabitants of the moon."[403] The North and the South had never been in complete harmony; economically they were different and had different interests, but something new had developed during the seven or eight years just passed. There was evidently a rift in the Union; on several occasions talks of secession had been heard. These rumors did not correspond to any real danger, but if the elections proved that the Union was formed of two solid blocks of States, if the North remained Federalist and the South were Republican, the very existence of the nation would be put in question. Yet this seemed to be a probable eventuality. In these circumstances, a victory of the South would mean a defeat of the North, the country would be divided against itself and the Union would be destroyed. This was particularly to be feared if the powers of the Federal Government were enlarged. Leaving aside all question of principle as to the moral merit of the questions under dispute, Jefferson tried to show, on the one hand, that it was impossible ever to organize a centralized form of government for the simple reason that the United States were too big and covered a territory much too large. If a centralized government were established on paper, it would be necessary to have many agents of the Federal Government with extensive powers distributed over all the States, and because of their very remoteness they would be beyond the possibility of continuous control. This could only mean corruption, plunder, and waste. On the other hand, since on fundamental questions it was impossible to bring into accord the North and the South, the true and only remedy was to minimize the chances of conflict and to reduce to a minimum the powers and attributes of the Federal Government. "The true theory of our Constitution is surely the wisest and best, that the States are independent as to everything within themselves, and united as to everything respecting foreign nations." Once more, therefore, he came back to the original theory of 1776 that, in forming a social compact, liberty is exchanged for security and only those rights are given up which the members of the new society have not full power to enforce. Thus his theory of State rights was not only well founded in theory but proved by practice and experience. Any other system would almost necessarily conduce to a secession. The man who wrote these lines in the summer of 1800, more than half a century before the Civil War, was certainly not an ordinary politician; his was the clear farsightedness of a great statesman and true political philosopher.