The ideal government he had in mind at the time could perhaps be described as a democracy, but he did not use the word himself, not even many years later in his "Autobiography" where he simply spoke of "a government truly republican." He was much opposed to the perpetuation of an hereditary landed gentry, but I do not see that he would have approved or even conceived the possibility of a government placed entirely under the control of unenlightened men. The Bill for the more General Diffusion of Knowledge makes clear that only through a liberal education can men be "rendered worthy to receive and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens", and the Bill for Amending the Charter of William and Mary proclaims even more emphatically that the old college must "become the seminary, in which those who are to be the future guardians of the rights of liberty of their country may be endowed with science and virtue, to watch and preserve the sacred deposit." Jefferson was a friend of the people, but no admirer and no flatterer of the "plain people", nor did he entertain any illusion about their participation in all the forms of government. For the present it was enough, as he wrote in the "Autobiography", if they were qualified through elementary education "to exercise with intelligence _their_ parts in self-Government." If he rebelled against aristocracy of wealth, he would have reacted with equal vehemence against mob tyranny. Neither was he radical enough to admit _propagandistes par le fait_ and to forbid society the right to intervene "when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order." (Bill for Religious Freedom.) For freedom of speech does not entail freedom of action: and the civil rights or rights of compacts are necessarily subject to civil regulations.