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of all bom after a certain day, and deportation at a proper age. But it was found that the public mind would not yet bear the pro position, nor will it bear it even at this day. Yet the day is not distant when it must bear and adopt it, or worse will follow. No thing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people are to be free ; nor is it less certain that the two races, , equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion have drawn indelible lines of distinction between them. It is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation and deportation, peaceably, and in such slow degree, as that the evil will wear off insensibly, and their place be, pari passu, filled up by free white laborers. If, on the contrary, it is left to force itself on, human nature must shudder at the prospect held up. We should in vain look for an example in the Spanish deportation or deletion of the Moors. This precedent would fall far short of our case.
I considered four of these bills, passed or reported, as forming a system by which every fibre would be eradicated of antient or fu ture aristocracy ; and a foundation laid for a government truly re publican. The repeal of the laws of entail would prevent the ac cumulation and perpetuation of wealth, in select families, and pre serve the soil of the country from being daily more and more ab sorbed in mortmain. The abolition of primogeniture, and equal partition of inheritances, removed the feudal and unnatural distinc tions which made one member of every family rich, and all the rest poor, substituting equal partition, the best of all Agrarian laws. The restoration of the rights of conscience, relieved the people from taxation for the support of a religion not theirs ; for the establish ment was truly of the religion of the rich, the dissenting sects being entirely composed of the less wealthy people ; and these, by the bill for a general education, would be qualified to understand their rights, to maintain them, and to exercise with intelligence their parts in self-government : and all this would be effected, without the vio lation of a single natural right of any one individual citizen. To these, too, might be added, as a further security-, the introduction of the trial by jury, into the Chancery courts, which have already in- gulphed, and continue to ingulph, so great a proportion of the ju risdiction over our property.
On the 1st of June, 1779, 1 was appointed Governor of the Com monwealth, and retired from the legislature. Being elected, also, one of the Visitors of William and Mary college, a self-electing body, I effected, during my residence in Williamsburg that year, a change in the organization of that institution, by abolishing the Grammar school, and the two professorships of Divinity and Oriental languages, and substituting a professorship of Law and Police, one of
