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shores are covered with cities. The cities are filled with inhabitants. . . . Peace walks serene and unalarmed over all the unmo lested regions — while liberty, virtue, and religion go hand in hand, harmoniously pro tecting, enlivening, and exalting all! Happy country! May thy happiness be perpetual! ' ' After tracing the rise and fall of govern mental institutions from the days of anti quity, he exhorted the citizens of the young nation to frugality, temperance, and the highest civic duty, and painted in a power ful word picture the fall of Rome as a warn ing to the infant republic. "A progressive state," he asserted, "is necessary to the happiness and perfection of man." He abjured the people to protect the ballot and conscientiously to discharge their electoral duty, declaring: "Of what immense consequence is it then that this primal duty should be faithfully and skillfully discharged! . . . You will for give me, I am sure, for endeavoring to impress upon your minds, in the strongest manner, the importance of this great duty. It is the first concoction in politics. . . . Let no one say, that he is but a single citizen, and that his ticket will be but one in the box. That one ticket may turn the elec tion. In battle every soldier should con sider the public safety as depending on his single arm; at an election every citizen should consider the public happiness as depend ing on his single vote."
ment; and he adds that although James Wilson "required from his students a much higher fee than was usually paid to the other gentlemen of the law, the General unhesitatingly overruled the intention I expressed to him of entering some other office on account of that difference, by arguments strongly indicating the high opinion he entertained of " James Wilson, and in the same communication Mr. Justice Washington spoke of Wilson as "a sincere friend of the General." George Washing ton gave his personal note to Wilson for one hundred guineas "for receiving my [his] nephew Mr. Bushrod Washington as a student of law in his office." This docu ment is of such historic interest that a facsimile reproduction, with Wilson's receipt endorsed, is here inserted through the courtesy of Hon. Hampton L. Carson, former Attorney General of Pennsylvania, in whose historical collection it now is. On August 7, 1790, the trustees of the College of Philadelphia, afterwards the University of Pennsylvania, as the result of the suggestion of Charles Smith, Esq., son of the Provost, and formerly a student in James Wilson's law office, appointed a committee of three, of which Wilson was one, to consider the propriety of establish ing a law professorship, and one week later they submitted an outline plan, prepared by Wilson, for a course of law lectures. It is still preserved among the Wilson papers in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. It is so clear and so applicable to present day conditions that we here reproduce the essential portions :
It is not strange that it was to a man of such mental grasp and moral caliber that George Washington, who had learned to know and understand Wilson during the early years of the Continental Congress, should have insisted in 1782 that his nephew Bushrod Washington should go for instruc tion in the law. Long years after, in "The object of a system of law lectures 1822, Bushrod Washington, then a Justice in this country should be to explain the of the Supreme Court of the United States, Constitution of the United States, its parts, wrote that his father had sent him to its powers, and distribution, and the opera Philadelphia in the winter of 1781-82 with tion of those powers; to ascertain the merits a view to the study of the law, and that of that Constitution by comparing it with the constitutions of other states, with the General Washington, happening to be in general principles of government, and with the city, undertook to superintend the the rights of man; to point out the spirit, the design, and the probable effects of the necessary arrangements for his establish
