Thus far the national consciousness of Thomas Jefferson had been somewhat hazy. Born in Virginia and intensely devoted to the Old Dominion, he had never left his native habitat until he was sent as a delegate to Congress. There only did he realize the divergences of the different colonies and the imperious necessity for them to organize their life and to agree to some sort of a permanent compact. No dealings with foreign nations could be transacted, no efficient measures of protection against the common foe could be devised, unless the several States were held together by some sort of a common bond and had achieved some sort of a unity. While the Articles of Confederation were being discussed, he puzzled over the essence and meaning of these "natural rights" so often mentioned in the different committees on which he sat, and he preserved the result of his meditations in an unpublished document I had the good fortune to discover in the Library of Congress. First of all, he was led to establish a distinction between the fundamental natural rights, which the individual can exercise by himself, and another class of rights which cannot be safely enjoyed unless society provides adequate protection. In forming a society and in accepting a social compact, the first rights were to be reserved and to remain inalienable; rights of the second class, on the contrary, were partly given up in exchange for more security. This very simple distinction enabled the young delegate to do away with the old antinomy so perplexing to many political philosophers and to solve the difficulty against which Rousseau had vainly struggled in his _Contrat social_. The individual remained in full possession of certain rights; society was granted only part of the others, a part to be determined strictly in forming a social compact: the citizen no longer had to sacrifice all his rights on the altar of the country; he remained sovereign in a sovereign society.