The choice of the abstracts made by this young Virginian who was still in his twenties already reveals an extraordinary capacity for absorbing knowledge and a most remarkable independence of thought. As he had planned to build a house according to his own plans, he had likewise decided to construct for himself, with material just as carefully chosen, the intellectual house in which he intended to live. Had not the Revolution intervened, Thomas Jefferson would probably have spent his years in his native colony, become a successful member of the Virginia bar, perhaps a judge learned and respected, a wealthy landowner adding constantly to the paternal acres. He had no ambition and little suspected his own latent genius, and yet, during all these years which he might have passed in leisurely and pleasant idleness, he never ceased, unknowingly as it were, to prepare himself for the great part he was to play. When the call came he was ready. The ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence were common property, but their felicitous wording was not due to a sudden and feverish inspiration. The young Virginian expressed only the definite conclusions he had slowly reached in reading the historians and the old lawyers. The principles there proclaimed were not abstract and _a priori_ principles; they were distinctly the principles that had directed his Saxon forefathers in their "settlement" of England. They were the legitimate inheritance of their descendants and continuators who had brought over with them to America the rights of their ancestors to settle in sparsely inhabited land, there to live freely and happily under institutions chosen by themselves. To go back to a primitive past, to the good old times, had been the dream of many political philosophers; but Jefferson's vision of that ancestral past was no dream, for it had originated in the only part of the inhabited earth where it could become a reality. This was the true background of the Declaration of Independence, the background of Jeffersonian democracy--a curious justification of the pioneer spirit by a student of history who cared little for abstract reasoning and philosophical constructions.