iness of his
motherless children, and of enjoying once more their loving
companionship and sympathy.

But in such a crisis of his country's fate, such a man as Patrick
Henry could not be permitted long to remain in seclusion; and the
promptness and the heartiness with which he was now summoned back into
the service of the public as a civilian, after the recent
humiliations of his military career, were accented, perhaps, on the
part of his neighbors, by something of the fervor of intended
compensation, if not of intended revenge. For, in the mean time, the
American colonies had been swiftly advancing, along a path strewn with
corpses and wet with blood, towards the doctrine that a total
separation from the mother-country,--a thing hitherto contemplated by
them only as a disaster and a crime,--might after all be neither, but
on the contrary, the only resource left to them in their desperate
struggle for political existence. This supreme question, it was plain,
was to confront the very next Virginia convention, which was under
appointment to meet early in the coming May. Almost at once,
therefore, after his return home, Patrick Henry was elected by his
native county to represent it in that convention.

On Monday morning, the 6th of May, the convention gathered at
Williamsburg for its first meeting. On its roll of members we see many
of those names which have become familiar to us in the progress of
this history,--the names of those sturdy and well-trained leaders who
guided Virginia during all that stormy period,--Pendleton, Cary,
Mason, Nicholas, Bland, the Lees, Mann Page, Dudley Digges, Wythe,
Edmund Randolph, and a few others. For the first time also, on such a
roll, we meet the name of James Madison, an accomplished young
political philosopher, then but four years from the inspiring
instruction of President Witherspoon at Princeton. But while a few
very able men had places in that convention, it was, at the time, by
some observers thought to contain an unusually large number of
incompetent persons. Three days after the opening of the session
Landon Carter wrote to Washington:--

"I could have wished that ambition had not so visibly seized
so much ignorance all over the colony, as it seems to have
done; for this present convention abounds with too many of
the inexperienced creatures to navigate our bark on this
dangerous coast; so that I fear the few skilful pilots who
have hitherto d