their patrons and friends exposed to be insulted and silenced by the votaries of tyranny and usurpation."

My countrymen! do not your hearts burn within you at the recital of these words, when the retrospect brings to your minds the time when, and the person by whom they were spoken? Compare them with the closing paragraphs of the address from the first Congress of 1774, to your forefathers, the people of the Colonies.

"Your own salvation and that of your posterity now depends upon yourselves. Against the temporary inconveniences you may suffer from a stoppage of Trade, you will weigh in the opposite balance the endless miseries you and your descendants must endure from an established arbitrary power. You will not forget the Honor of your Country that must, from your behavior, take its title in the estimation of the world to Glory or to Shame; and you will with the deepest attention reflect, that if the peaceable mode of opposition recommended by us be broken and rendered ineffectual, you must inevitably be reduced to choose either a more dangerous contest, or a final ruinous and infamous submission. We think ourselves bound in duty to observe to you that the schemes agitated against these Colonies have been so conducted as to render it prudent that you should extend your views to mournful events and be in all respects prepared for every contingency."

That was the trumpet of summons to the conflict of the revolution; as the address of April, 1783 was

the note of triumph at its close. They were the first and the last words of the Spirit, which in the germ of the Colonial contest, brooded over its final fruit, the universal emancipation of civilized man.

Compare them both with the opening and closing paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence, too deeply rivited in your memories to need the repetition of them by me; and you have the unity of action essential to all heroic achievement for the benefit of mankind, and you have the character from its opening to its close; the beginning, the middle and the end of that unexampled, and yet unimitated moral and political agent, the Revolutionary North American Congress.

But the Address of 1783 marks the commencement of one era in American History as well as the close of another. MADISON, Ellsworth, Hamilton, were not of the Congress of 1774, nor yet of the Congress which declared Independence. They were of a succeeding generation, men formed in and by the revolution itself. They had imbibed the Spirit of the revolution, but the nature of their task was changed. Theirs was no longer the duty to call upon their countrymen to extend their views to mournful events, and to prepare themselves for every contingency. But more emphatically than even the Congress of 1774, were they required to warn their fellow citizens that their salvation and that of their posterity depended upon themselves.

The warfare of self defence against foreign oppres

sion was accomplished. Independence, unqualified, commercial and political, was acheived and recognised. But there was yet in substance no nation—no people-no country common to the Union. These had been self-formed in the heat of the common struggle for freedom; and evaporated in the very success of the energies they had inspired. A Confederation of separate State Sovereignties, never sanctioned by the body of the people, could furnish no effective Government for the nation. A cold and lifeless indifference to the rights, the interests, and the duties of the Union had fallen like a palsy upon all their faculties instead of that almost supernatural vigor which, at the origin of their contest, had inscribed upon their banners, and upon their hearts, "join or die."

In November, 1783, Mr. MADISON's constitutional term of service in Congress, as limited by the restriction in the articles of Confederation, expired. But his talents were not lost to his Country. He was elected the succeeding year a member of the Legislature of his native State, and continued by annual election in that station till November, 1786, when having become re-eligible to Congress, he was again returned to that body, and on the 12th of February, 1787, resumed his seat among its members.

In the Legislature of Virginia, his labors, during his absence of three years from the general councils of the Confederacy, were not less arduous and unremitting, nor less devoted to the great purposes of revolutionary legislation, than while he had been in Con

gress. The colony of Virginia had been settled under the auspicies of the Episcopal Churh of England. It was there the established Church; and all other religious denominations, there, as in England, were stigmatized with the name of dissenters. For the support of this Church, the Colonial laws prior to the revolution had subjected to taxation all the inhabitants of the Colony, and it had been endowed with grants of property by the Crown. The effect of this had naturally been to render the Church establishment unpopular, and the clergy of that establishment generally unfriendly to the revolution. After the close of the War, in the year 1784, Mr. Jefferson introduced into the Legislature a Bill for the establishment of Religious Freedom. The principle of the Bill was the abolition of all taxation for the support of Religion, or of its Ministers, and to place the freedom of all religious opinions wholly beyond the control of the Legislature. These purposes were avowed, and supported by a long argumentative preamble. The Bill failed however to obtain the assent of the Assembly, and instead of it they prepared and caused to be printed a Bill establishing a provision for teachers of the Christian Religion. At the succeeding session of the Legislature, Mr. Jefferson was absent from the country, but Mr. Madison, as the champion of Religious Liberty, supplied his place. A memorial and Remonstrance against the Bill making provision for the teachers of the Christian Religion was composed by Mr. Madison, and signed by multitudes of

the citizens of the Commonwealth, and the Bill drafted by Mr. Jefferson, together with its preamble, was by the influence of his friend triumphantly carried against all opposition through the Legislature.

The principle that religious opinions are altogether beyond the sphere of legislative control, is but one modification of a more extensive axiom, which includes the unlimited freedom of the press, of speech, and of the communication of thought in all its forms. An authoritative provision by law for the support of teachers of the Christian Religion was prescribed by the third Article of the Bill of Rights in the Constitution of this Commonwealth. An amendment recently adopted by the people has given their sanction to the opinions of Jefferson and Madison, and the substance of the Virginia Statute, for the establishment of Religious Freedom, now forms a part of the Constitution of Massachusetts. That the freedom and communication of thought is paramount to all legislative authority, is a sentiment becoming from day to day more prevalent throughout the civilized world, and which it is fervently to be hoped will henceforth remain inviolate by the legislative authorities not only of the Union but of all its confederated States.

At the Session of 1785, a general revisal was made of the Statute Laws of Virginia, and the great burden of the task devolved upon Mr. Madison as chairman of the Judiciary Committee of the House. The general principle which pervaded this operation was the adaptation of the civil code of the Commonwealth, to