Far more judicial in tone was the neat state paper prepared by Jefferson to answer Lord North's "Conciliatory Proposition." The committee appointed consisted of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Richard H. Lee. The youngest member of the committee was chosen to draw up the document, the answer of the Virginia Assembly he had brought with him having been approved. Not for nothing had Jefferson attended the courts of justice of Albemarle County and Williamsburg for more than ten years and listened to decisions from the bench. The answer strives to be a cold, dispassionate enumeration of facts, with its short paragraphs beginning: "we are of opinion"--recalling the "Whereases" of legal documents. But there is an undertone of indignation, cropping up in every sentence, which belies the studied reserve. The conclusion, one might call it a peroration, is a genuine specimen of revolutionary eloquence: When it considers the great armaments with which they have invaded us, and the circumstances of cruelty with which these have commenced and prosecuted hostilities; when these things, we say, are laid together and attentively considered, can the world be deceived into an opinion that we are unreasonable? Or can it hesitate to believe with us, that nothing but our own exertions may defeat the ministerial sentence of death or abject submission? Truly Jefferson might have become a great orator had he chosen to correct his handicap in speech and train his voice. Historians who attribute much importance to racial traits and inherited characteristics may believe that this was due to the Welshman that reappeared in him at times; but the Welsh temperament was suppressed and checked by the puritanical restraint of Mr. Small, Mr. Maury, the judicial reserve of Mr. Wythe, the example of Mr. Peyton Randolph; and, carried away as he was by Patrick Henry's oratory, Jefferson saw in him impulsive and emotional qualities to be admired but to be shunned. More than any of his contemporaries, however, he was unconsciously influenced by reminiscences of speeches he had read and memorized in Livy, Cicero and perhaps Demosthenes. These sentences have a classical ring; his true models were the Greek and Latin orators, and if a critical edition of Jefferson's early papers were ever attempted, a careful investigation could not fail to bring to light the classical sources of his inspiration.