Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 1.djvu/149

138 impossible; for even Jefferson, with all his liberality of ideas, was Virginian enough to discourage the introduction of manufactures and the gathering of masses in cities, without which no new life could grow. Among the common people, intellectual activity was confined to hereditary commonplaces of politics, resting on the axiom that Virginia was the typical society of a future Arcadian America. To es­cape the tyranny of Cæsar by perpetuating the sim­ple and isolated lives of their fathers was the sum of their political philosophy; to fix upon the national government the stamp of their own idyllic conserva­tism was the height of their ambition.

Debarred from manufactures, possessed of no ship­ping, and enjoying no domestic market, Virginian energies necessarily knew no other resource than agriculture. Without church, university, schools, or literature in any form that required or fostered in­tellectual life, the Virginians concentrated their thoughts almost exclusively upon politics; and this concentration produced a result so distinct and last­ing, and in character so respectable, that American history would lose no small part of its interest in losing the Virginia school.

No one denied that Virginia, like Massachusetts, in the War of Independence, believed herself compe­tent to follow independently of other provinces whatever path seemed good. The Constitution of Virginia did not, like that of Massachusetts, authorize the governor to "be the commander-in-chief of the army