Roy, Well, you are the expert on this, but I would submit that there is an underlying principle common to at least the Bourbaki and Hilbert programs as well as the Euclid program. That underlying program is best described as being Occam's Razor, a kind of intellectual optimization: how do we prove the useful results we want to have proven with the smallest set of assumptions/ axioms. You are right, although you did not quite state it this way, that for many of these folks, especially the Bourbakists, this optimization goal was probably more important than the absolute reality or lack thereof of the axioms. Euclid may not have formulated in precisely these terms, as Hilbert pretty clear did (even if he did not specifically cite Occam [or Ockham]), but having a heuristic goal would tend to lead one to such a simplification. Perhaps we might think of Euclid as having been a satisficer in this realm, with wanting to have as few axioms as possible, but with the constraint that they appeal to common sense and at least appear to be true. Barkley Rosser