e, A Summary View of the
Rights of British America.[29]

[29] Both are published in Van Schreeven and Scribner,
Revolutionary Virginia, I, 169-203 and 240-256.

Thomson Mason's letters, often ignored in favor of Jefferson's
Summary View, are especially intriguing because they start with
a favorite Virginia assumption--The British constitution was "the
wisest system of legislation that ever did, or perhaps ever will,
exist". It provided a balance in government between the crown, the
nobility, and the commons, or as Mason suggests, it blended the three
forms of government, "monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy (each)
possessed of their distinct powers, checked, tempered, and improved
each other.... The honour of the monarchy tempered the Impetuousity of
democracy, the moderation of aristocracy checked the ardent aspiring
honour of monarchy, and the virtue of democracy restrained the one,
impelled the other, and invigorated both. In short, no constitution
ever bid so fair for perpetual duration as that of England, and none
ever half so well deserved it, since political liberty was its sole
aim, and the general good of mankind the principal object of its
attention."

What went wrong according to Mason, was not that a hapless king
ascended the throne, but a corrupt aristocracy had perverted parliament
and parliamentary powers to its own end. Therefore, the colonies owed
no obedience to the laws of parliament at all; in fact, to no law
passed by that body since 1607. The people of Virginia should be
prepared to defend themselves and ready to "unsheath the sword" to show
the English aristocracy they were determined to protect the "few Rights
which still remain" and to regain "the many privileges you have already
lost." With great courage Mason signed his name to the last letter, in
which he undoubtedly had written treasonous remarks. It is a measure of
the times that no Virginian rose to shout "Treason!" in 1774.

Jefferson's more famous Summary View moved to nearly the same
conclusion with perhaps even more emotion and rhetoric. Intended to
arouse the convention, from which he was absent, the Summary
View is one of Jefferson's few impassioned pleas, written with
fervor in what Dumas Malone, his distinguished biographer, calls "the
white heat of indignation against the coercive acts."[30] Filled with
errors he would undoubtedly have corrected if he had not fallen sick,
Jefferson directed himself toward moral a