ations in particular families, handed down from generation
to generation, under the English law of entails. But the only object
of ambition for the wealthy was a seat in the King's Council. All their
court then was paid to the crown and its creatures; and they Philipized
in all collisions between the King and the people. Hence they were
unpopular; and that unpopularity continues attached to their names. A
Randolph, a Carter, or a Burwell must have great personal superiority
over a common competitor, to be elected by the people, even at this
day. At the first session of our legislature after the Declaration of
Independence, we passed a law abolishing entails. And this was followed
by one abolishing the privilege of primogeniture, and dividing the
lands of intestates equally among all their children, or other
representatives. These laws, drawn by myself, laid the axe to the root
of pseudo-aristocracy. And had another which I prepared been adopted by
the legislature, our work would have been complete. It was a bill for
the more general diffusion of learning. This proposed to divide every
county into wards of five or six miles square, like your townships; to
establish in each ward a free school for reading, writing, and common
arithmetic; to provide for the annual selection of the best subjects
from these schools, who might receive, at the public expense, a higher
degree of education at a district school; and from these district
schools to select a certain number of the most promising subjects, to
be completed at an University, where all the useful sciences should
be taught. Worth and genius would thus have been sought out from every
condition of life, and completely prepared by education for defeating
the competition of wealth and birth for public trusts. My proposition
had, for a further object, to impart to these wards those portions of
self-government for which they are best qualified, by confiding to them
the care of their poor, their roads, police, elections, the nomination
of jurors, administration of justice in small cases, elementary
exercises of militia; in short, to have made them little republics, with
a warden at the head of each, for all those concerns which, being under
their eye, they would better manage than the larger republics of the
county or State. A general call of ward-meetings by their wardens on the
same day through the State, would at any time produce the genuine sense
of the people on any required p