y the general
inconvenience of living without them. I will not, I cannot, justify
it; however culpable my conduct, I will so far pay my 'devoir' to
virtue as to own the excellence and rectitude of her precepts, and to
lament my want of conformity to them. I believe a time will come when
an opportunity will be offered to abolish this lamentable evil:
everything we can do is to improve it, if it happens in our day; if
not, let us transmit to our descendants, together with our slaves, a
pity for their unhappy lot, and an abhorrence of slavery. We owe to
the purity of our religion, to show that it is at variance with that
law which warrants slavery."[443] After the Revolution, and before the
adoption of the Constitution, he earnestly advocated, in the Virginia
House of Delegates, some method of emancipation; and even in the
Convention of 1788, where he argued against the Constitution on the
ground that it obviously conferred upon the general government, in an
emergency, that power of emancipation which, in his opinion, should be
retained by the States, he still avowed his hostility to slavery, and
at the same time his inability to see any practicable means of ending
it: "Slavery is detested: we feel its fatal effects,--we deplore it
with all the pity of humanity.... As we ought with gratitude to admire
that decree of Heaven which has numbered us among the free, we ought
to lament and deplore the necessity of holding our fellow-men in
bondage. But is it practicable, by any human means, to liberate them
without producing the most dreadful and ruinous consequences?"[444]

During all the years of his retirement, his great fame drew to him
many strangers, who came to pay their homage to him, to look upon his
face, to listen to his words. Such guests were always received by him
with a cordiality that was unmistakable, and so modest and simple as
to put them at once at their ease. Of course they desired most of all
to hear him talk of his own past life, and of the great events in
which he had borne so brilliant a part; but whenever he was persuaded
to do so, it was always with the most quiet references to himself. "No
man," says one who knew him well, "ever vaunted less of his
achievements than Mr. H. I hardly ever heard him speak of those great
achievements which form the prominent part of his biography. As for
boasting, he was entirely a stranger to it, unless it be that, in his
latter days, he seemed proud of the goodness of hi