In the winter of 1781—82, Thomas Jefferson wrote his Notes on the State of Virginia as a series of "Queries" examining in detail the quality of life in his region. One of the most famous of the queries is Number XIX, which contains the remark that "Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue." "Let our work-shops remain in Europe," he adds. Yet Jefferson was very much aware as he wrote that his countrymen found industrial and commercial careers attractive; they had "transferred" to themselves, he remarked, the "European" economic principle that "every state should endeavor to manufacture for itself ..." (164). It was only after admitting this economic fact of life of his nation that Jefferson, in a very different strain, launched his praise of the husbandman. And it is essential to recognize that as he did so, Jefferson abandoned the pretext of speaking as a political economist charting the country's course and became decidedly a moral philosopher who based his preference for farming not on economic realities but on the spiritual superiority of the endeavor.