realm that knew no allegiance other than to the
government that here had its feeble beginning. They would--near a
century and a half later than the meeting of the first House of
Burgesses--have beheld their descendants listening in rapt attention
to the impassioned denunciation by Patrick Henry of the tyranny of
the royal successor of James the First; the thirteen colonies arming
for the seven years' struggle with the most powerful of nations;
the presentation, by a Virginian, in the wondrous assemblage at
Philadelphia of the Declaration of Independence; under the matchless
leadership of a Virginian yet more illustrious than Jefferson, the
Colonial army, with decimated ranks and tattered standards,
would have passed in review--all past suffering, sacrifice,
humiliation, and defeat forgotten in the hour of splendid triumph.
Yet later, and in the great convention over which Washington
presided, and in which Madison was the chief factor, they would
have witnessed the deathless principles of the historic Declaration
crystallized into the Federal compact, which was destined forever to
hold States and people in fraternal union. They would have seen
a gallant people of the Old World--catching inspiration from the
New--casting off the oppression of centuries and, through baptism of
blood, fashioning a Republic upon that whose liberties they had so
signally aided to establish. Yet later, and not France alone, but
Mexico and States extending far to the southward, substituting for
monarchical rule that of the people under written Constitutions
modeled after that of the great American Republic. And yet more
marvellous, in Great Britain the divine right of kings an exploded
dogma; the royal successor to the Stuarts and George the Third only
a ceremonial figurehead in government; the House of Lords in its
death struggle; all real political power centred in the Commons,
and England--though still under the guise of monarchy--essentially
a republic.

"And what a grand factor Virginia has been in all that pertains to
human government in this Western world during the past three
centuries. From the pen of one of her illustrious sons, George
Mason, came the 'Bill of Rights'--now in its essentials embedded
by the early amendments into our Federal Constitution; from that
of another, not alone the great Declaration, but the statutes
securing for his own State religious freedom, and the abolition of
primogeniture--the detested legacy of