e and esteemed the virtues of a primitive society, and braced
their minds with the tonic of Calvin's theology--a tonic somewhat
tempered in these late enlightened days by a more humane philosophy and
the friendly emotionalism of simple folk living close to nature.

Free burgesses from the back-country, set apart in dress and manners
from the great planters, less learned and less practiced in oratory and
the subtle art of condescension and patronage than the cultivated men
of the inner circle, were nevertheless staunch defenders of liberty and
American rights and were perhaps beginning to question, in these days of
popular discussion, whether liberty could very well flourish among men
whose wealth was derived from the labor of negro slaves, or be well
guarded under all circumstances by those who, regarding themselves as
superior to the general run of men, might be in danger of mistaking
their particular interests for the common welfare. And indeed it
now seemed that these great men who sent their sons to London to be
educated, who every year shipped their tobacco to England and bought
their clothes of English merchants with whom their credit was always
good, were grown something too timid, on account of their loyalty to
Britain, in the great question of asserting the rights of America.

Jean Jacques Rousseau would have well understood Patrick Henry, one of
those passionate temperaments whose reason functions not in the service
of knowledge but of good instincts and fine emotions; a nature to be
easily possessed of an exalted enthusiasm for popular rights and for
celebrating the virtues of the industrious poor. This enthusiasm in the
case of Patrick Henry was intensified by his own eloquence, which had
been so effectively exhibited in the famous Parson's Cause, and in
opposition to the shady scheme which the old leaders in the House of
Burgesses had contrived to protect John Robinson, the Treasurer, from
being exposed to a charge of embezzlement. Such courageous exploits,
widely noised abroad, had won for the young man great applause and had
got him a kind of party of devoted followers in the backcountry and
among the yeomanry and young men throughout the province, so that to
take the lead and to stand boldly forth as the champion of liberty
and the submerged rights of mankind seemed to Patrick Henry a kind of
mission laid upon him, in virtue of his heavenly gift of speech, by that
Providence which shapes the destinies of