Our revolution commenced on more favorable ground.  It presented 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 on so far with its premiere ebauch; but it is now proposing to call a convention for amendment.  Among other improvements, I hope they will adopt the subdivision of our counties into wards.  The former may be estimated at an average of twenty-four miles square; the latter should be about six miles square each, and would answer to the hundreds of your Saxon Alfred.  In each of these might be, 1.  An elementary school. 2.  A company of militia, with