Among the several suggestions made in the committee, the one proposed by Jefferson, according to John Adams, deserves particular attention: "Mr. Jefferson proposed, the children of Israel in the wilderness led by a cloud by day, and a pillar by night--and on the other side, Hengist and Horsa, the Saxon chiefs, from whom we claim the honor of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed." None of the suggestions made by the committee, or their final report, was ever adopted, but the device proposed by Jefferson is a significant indication that his thoughts were still running in the same channel. "The children of Israel" would remind one of the favorite contention of the settlers, piously preserved by their descendants to this day, that they were a chosen people; but the other side of the seal reminds one that Jefferson's great ambition at that time was to promote a renaissance of Anglo-Saxon primitive institutions on the new continent. Thus presented, the American Revolution was nothing but the reclamation of the Anglo-Saxon birthright of which the colonists had been deprived by "a long trend of abuses." Nor does it appear that there was anything in this theory which surprised or shocked his contemporaries; Adams apparently did not disapprove of it, and it would be easy to bring in many similar expressions of the same idea in documents of the time. The principle once established, there remained to put it into effect, and to make a beginning in Virginia. This was the thought uppermost in Jefferson's mind when he went back to the Old Dominion. "Are we not the better for what we have hitherto abolished of the feudal system," he wrote to Edmund Pendleton. "Has not every restitution of the ancient Saxon laws had happy effects? Is it not better now that we return at once into that happy system of our ancestors, the wisest and most perfect ever yet devised by the wit of man, as it stood before the 8th century?"[55] This is the true foundation of Jefferson's political philosophy. No greater mistake could be made than to look for his sources in Locke, Montesquieu, or Rousseau. The Jeffersonian democracy was born under the sign of Hengist and Horsa, not of the Goddess Reason.