their attention, or his situation, may merit
that degree of consideration, which will justify the legislature in
permitting him to avail himself of the mode of selling by lottery, for
the purpose of paying his debts.

That a fair price cannot be obtained by sale in the ordinary way, and
in the present depressed state of agricultural industry, is well known.
Lands in this State will not now sell for more than a third or fourth of
what they would have brought a few years ago, perhaps at the very time
of the contraction of the debts for which they are now to be sold.
The low price in foreign markets, for a series of years past, of
agricultural produce, of wheat generally, of tobacco most commonly, and
the accumulation of duties on the articles of consumption not produced
within our State, not only disable the farmer or planter from adding to
his farm by purchase, but reduce him to sell his own, and remove to the
western country, glutting the market he leave's, while he lessens the
number of bidders. To be protected against this sacrifice is the object
of the present application, and whether the applicant has any particular
claim to this protection, is the present question.

Here the answer must be left to others. It is not for me to give it. I
may, however, more readily than others, suggest the offices in which I
have served. I came of age in 1764, and was soon put into the nomination
of justices of the county in which I live, and at the first election
following I became one of its representatives in the legislature.

I was thence sent to the old Congress.

Then employed two years, with Mr. Pendleton and Mr. Wythe, on the
revisal and reduction to a single code of the whole body of the British
statutes, the acts of our Assembly, and certain parts of the common law.

Then elected Governor.

Next to the legislature, and to Congress again.

Sent to Europe as Minister Plenipotentiary.

Appointed Secretary of State to the new government.

Elected Vice President, and

President.

And lastly, a Visitor and Rector of the University.

In these different offices, with scarcely any interval between them, I
have been in the public service now sixty-one years; and during the far
greater part of the time, in foreign countries or in other States. Every
one knows how inevitably a Virginia estate, goes to ruin, when the owner
is so far distant as to be unable to pay attention to it himself; and
the more especially, when the li