lf, with a
grim wilfulness that would not yield either to bodily weakness, or to
the attractions or the distractions of politics. It is delightful to
be permitted to add, that his energy was abundantly rewarded; and that
in exactly eight years thereafter, namely in 1794, he was able to
retire, in comfort and wealth, from all public and professional
employments of every sort.

Of course the mere announcement, in 1786, that Patrick Henry was then
ready once more to receive clients, was enough to excite the attention
of all persons in Virginia who might have important interests in
litigation. His great renown throughout the country, his high personal
character, his overwhelming gifts in argument, his incomparable gifts
in persuasion, were such as to ensure an almost dominant advantage to
any cause which he should espouse before any tribunal. Confining
himself, therefore, to his function as an advocate, and taking only
such cases as were worth his attention, he was immediately called to
appear in the courts in all parts of the State.

It is not necessary for us to try to follow this veteran and brilliant
advocate in his triumphal progress from one court-house to another, or
to give the detail of the innumerable causes in which he was engaged
during these last eight years of his practice at the bar. Of all the
causes, however, in which he ever took part as a lawyer, in any period
of his career, probably the most difficult and important, in a legal
aspect, was the one commonly referred to as that of the British debts,
argued by him in the Circuit Court of the United States at Richmond,
first in 1791, and again, in the same place, in 1793.[417]

A glance at the origin of this famous cause will help us the better to
understand the significance of his relation to it. By the treaty with
Great Britain in 1783, British subjects were empowered "to recover
debts previously contracted to them by our citizens, notwithstanding a
payment of the debt into a state treasury had been made during the
war, under the authority of a state law of sequestration." According
to this provision a British subject, one William Jones, brought an
action of debt in the federal court at Richmond, against a citizen of
Virginia, Thomas Walker, on a bond dated May, 1772. The real question
was "whether payment of a debt due before the war of the Revolution,
from a citizen of Virginia to British subjects, into the loan office
of Virginia, pursuant to a law of