ed us an
album on which we were free to write what we pleased. We had no occasion
to search into musty records, to hunt up royal parchments, or to
investigate the laws and institutions of a semi-barbarous ancestry. We
appealed to those of nature, and found them engraved on our hearts. Yet
we did not avail ourselves of all the advantages of our position. We had
never been permitted to exercise self-government. When forced to assume
it, we were novices in its science. Its principles and forms had entered
little into our former education. We established however some, although
not all its important principles. The constitutions of most of our
States assert, that all power is inherent in the people; that they may
exercise it by themselves, in all cases to which they think themselves
competent (as in electing their functionaries, executive and
legislative, and deciding by a jury of themselves, in all
judiciary cases in which any fact is involved), or they may act by
representatives, freely and equally chosen; that it is their right and
duty to be at all times armed; that they are entitled to freedom of
person, freedom of religion, freedom of property, and freedom of the
press. In the structure of our legislatures, we think experience has
proved the benefit of subjecting questions to two separate bodies of
deliberants; but in constituting these, natural right has been mistaken,
some making one of these bodies, and some both, the representatives of
property instead of persons; whereas the double deliberation might be
as well obtained without any violation of true principle, either by
requiring a greater age in one of the bodies, or by electing a proper
number of representatives of persons, dividing them by lots into two
chambers, and renewing the division at frequent intervals, in order
to break up all cabals. Virginia, of which I am myself a native and
resident, was not only the first of the States, but, I believe I may
say, the first of the nations of the earth, which assembled its wise men
peaceably together to form a fundamental constitution, to commit it to
writing, and place it among their archives, where every one should be
free to appeal to its text. But this act was very imperfect. The other
States, as they proceeded successively to the same work, made
successive improvements; and several of them, still further corrected
by experience, have, by conventions, still further amended their first
forms. My own State has gone