g. If anyone doubts that the real
inspiration which made America a nation was drawn, not from Whiggish
quarrels about taxes, but from the great dogmas promulgated by
Jefferson, it is sufficient to point out that the States did not even
wait till their victory over England was assured before effecting a
complete internal revolution on the basis of those dogmas. Before the
last shot had been fired almost the last privilege had disappeared.

The process was a spontaneous one, and its fruits appear almost
simultaneously in every State. They can be followed best in Virginia,
where Jefferson himself took the lead in the work of revolutionary
reform.

Hereditary titles and privileges went first. On this point public
feeling became so strong that the proposal to form after the war a
society to be called "the Cincinnati," which was to consist of those who
had taken a prominent part in the war and afterwards of their
descendants, was met, in spite of the respect in which Washington and
the other military heroes were held, with so marked an expression of
public disapproval that the hereditary part of the scheme had to be
dropped.

Franchises were simplified, equalized, broadened, so that in practically
every State the whole adult male population of European race received
the suffrage. Social and economic reforms having the excellent aim of
securing and maintaining a wide distribution of property, especially of
land, were equally prominent among the achievements of that time.
Jefferson himself carried in Virginia a drastic code of Land Laws,
which anticipated many of the essential provisions which through the
_Code Napoleon_ revolutionized the system of land-owning in Europe. As
to the practical effect of such reforms we have the testimony of a man
whose instinct for referring all things to practice was, if anything, an
excess, and whose love for England was the master passion of his life.
"Every object almost that strikes my view," wrote William Cobbett many
years later, "sends my mind and heart back to England. In viewing the
ease and happiness of this people the contrast fills my soul with
indignation, and makes it more and more the object of my life to assist
in the destruction of the diabolical usurpation which has trampled on
king as well as people."

Another principle, not connected by any direct logic with democracy and
not set forth in the Declaration of Independence, was closely associated
with the democratic thesis