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 point, and would enable the State to act
in mass, as your people have so often done, and with so much effect, by
their town-meetings. The law for religious freedom, which made a part of
this system, having put down the aristocracy of the clergy, and restored
to the citizen the freedom of the mind, and those of entails and
descents nurturing an equality of condition among them, this on
education would have raised the mass of the people to the high ground
of moral respectability necessary to their own safety, and to orderly
government; and would have completed the great object of qualifying them
to select the veritable aristoi, for the trusts of government, to the
exclusion of the pseudalists: and the same Theognis, who has furnished
the epigraphs of your two letters, assures us that
[Illustration: page229]
Although this law has not yet been acted on but in a small and
inefficient degree, it is still considered as before the legislature,
with other bills of the revised code, not yet taken up, and I have great
hope that some patriotic spirit will, at a favorable moment, call it up,
and make it the key-stone of the arch of our government.
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