I4 8 THOMAS JEFFERSON 



discipline made them capable managers of affairs, keenly 

 alive to the bearings of political questions, and fierce 

 sticklers for local rights. There never existed a class 

 of men better fitted for laying the foundations of a 

 nation in which a broad and liberal democracy should 

 be found compatible with ingrained respect for parlia- 

 mentary methods and constitutional checks. 



Now it was this middle class of squires and yeo- 

 manry that furnished the best part of colonial society 

 in Virginia, as it furnished pretty much the whole of 

 colonial society in New England. An urban middle 

 class of merchants and artisans came in greater num- 

 bers to New England than to Virginia, and the South- 

 ern colony, besides its negroes, received a very low 

 class of population in the indented white servants, who 

 seem to have been the progenitors of the modern 

 "white trash." But the characteristic society that 

 which has made the histories of New England and of 

 Virginia what they are had the same origin in both 

 cases. There was also in both cases a principle of 

 selection at work, although not so early in Virginia as 

 in New England. As the latter country was chiefly 

 settled between 1629 and 1640, the years when 

 Charles I. was reigning without a Parliament, so the 

 former received the most valuable portion of its settlers 

 during the Commonwealth, when the son of that un- 

 fortunate monarch was off upon his travels. Men who 

 leave their country for conscience' sake are apt to be 

 picked men for ability and character, no matter what 

 side they may have espoused. Our politics may be 

 those of Samuel Adams, but we must admit that the 

 Hutchinson type of character is a valuable one to have 

 in the community. Of the gallant cavaliers who fought 



