to be simply to do the best he
could wherever he might be placed; to discharge faithfully, and to the
best of such ability as he had, whatever duty was intrusted to him. His
report of the proceedings in the congressional session of 1782-83, and
the letters written during those years and the year before, show that he
was not merely diligent but absorbed in the duties of his office.

He was more faithful to his constituents than his constituents sometimes
were to him. Anything that might happen at that period for want of money
can hardly be a matter of surprise; but Virginia, even then, should have
been able, it would seem, to find enough to enable its members of
Congress to pay their board-bills. He complains gently in his Addisonian
way of the inconvenience to which he was put for want of funds. "I
cannot," he writes to Edmund Randolph, "in any way make you more
sensible of the importance of your kind attention to pecuniary
remittances for me, than by informing you that I have for some time past
been a pensioner on the favor of Hayne Solomon, a Jew broker." A month
later he writes, that to draw bills on Virginia has been tried, "but in
vain;" nobody would buy them; and he adds, "I am relapsing fast into
distress. The case of my brethren is equally alarming." Within a week he
again writes: "I am almost ashamed to reiterate my wants so incessantly
to you, but they begin to be so urgent that it is impossible to suppress
them." But the Good Samaritan, Solomon, is still an unfailing reliance.
"The kindness of our little friend in Front Street, near the coffee
house, is a fund which will preserve me from extremities; but I never
resort to it without great mortification, as he obstinately rejects all
recompense. The price of money is so usurious that he thinks it ought to
be extorted from none but those who aim at profitable speculations. To a
necessitous delegate he gratuitously spares a supply out of his private
stock." It is a pretty picture of the simplicity of the early days of
the Republic. Between the average modern member and the money-broker,
under such circumstances, there would lurk, probably, a contract for
carrying the mails or for Indian supplies.

Relief, however, came at last. An appeal was made in a letter to the
governor of Virginia, which was so far public that anybody about the
executive office might read it. The answer to this letter, says Mr.
Madison, "seems to chide our urgency." But there soon came a bi