Thus spoke the pioneer, a pioneer who had studied law and history and could express in clear and forcible terms what the pioneers had felt only confusedly. Unless I am much mistaken, it is the first enunciation of one of the cardinal principles of Americanism; but, as far as Jefferson is concerned, it did not rest upon any political philosophy, either Hooker's or Locke's. The American settlers resumed and resurrected on a new soil the tradition interrupted by Parliamentary and kingly usurpations. By a sort of curious primitivism they renounced their immediate and degraded British forbears to claim as their true ancestors the Saxon conquerors of the British Isles. Can any one imagine anything farther from the theory of Rousseau in the "Discourse on the Origin of Inequality", or in the "Social Contract", anything farther from the universal humanitarianism of the French philosophers? In a last analysis, American society as it existed, and as it expressed its will to exist through its young spokesman, rested essentially not on an _a priori_ principle but on the right of conquest, or more exactly, of discovery. The best student of William and Mary, the young artist who wanted to make Monticello a thing of beauty, the lover of the literature of Greece and Rome, proclaimed loudly that "our ancestors who migrated hither were laborers, not lawyers." His was not a political philosophy dealing with "fictitious principles", it was the harsh, hard-headed, practical and fierce determination of the pioneer who stakes out a piece of land in the wilderness, ready to hold it against all claim jumpers. The Virginia convention dominated by "Randolph, the Lees, Nicholas, Pendleton" was not ready to go so far as the young master of Monticello. The instructions to the delegates finally adopted and printed in an appendix to Jefferson's own "Autobiography" were exceedingly tame, but his declaration was printed, widely circulated among the people, and even reached England. It was just what was needed to set afire the public mind, for no people will rise, fight and die for an economic doctrine or in defense of its commercial interests. They have to be provided with mottoes which appeal to their imagination, they have to be raised above the ordinary trend of things; they must have a banner, a flag and a battle cry, and such was the object of Jefferson's peroration, which no Pendleton and no Lee could have written: