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on external agencies for their subsistence. He believed that self-government was the best ideal for America, on the lines of the American Indians: he supported an American government only if the people gave their consent to be governed.

Jefferson respected the people's right to resistance to the government, saying, "What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms". This is one of the reasons why many of his contemporaries dubbed him a philosophical anarchist.

A standing military and extensive taxation was thought to be indispensable by the other minds of the times like Hamilton and Adams' Federalists, who held the notion that a government could not be entirely chosen and run by its people. They feared that a weak government without military, commercial monopolies and financial strength could not cope with internal and external threats.

Today's America may have flourished with the ability of commercial monopolies to exist, and on the strength of its powerful fiscal and military institutions. But what makes it a truly great nation is the freedoms of its people which were only made possible through the powerful, if idealistic American vision of one man: Thomas Jefferson.

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