Not one of these can be opened until
the book-room is completely finished, and all the shelves ready to
receive their charge directly from the boxes, as they shall be opened.
This cannot be till May. I hear nothing definitive of the three thousand
dollars duty of which we are asking the remission from Congress. In the
selection of our Law Professor, we must be rigorously attentive to his
political principles. You will recollect, that, before the Revolution,
Coke Littleton was the universal elementary book of law students, and
a sounder whig never wrote, nor of profounder learning in the orthodox
doctrines of the British constitution, or in what were called English
liberties. You remember also that our lawyers were then all whigs. But
when his black-letter text, and uncouth but cunning learning got out of
fashion, and the honied Mansfieldism of Blackstone became the students'
hornbook, from that moment, that profession (the nursery of our
Congress) began to slide into toryism, and nearly all the young brood
of lawyers now are of that hue. They suppose themselves, indeed, to be
whigs, because they no longer know what whigism or republicanism means.
It is in our seminary that that vestal flame is to be kept alive; it is
thence it is to spread anew over our own and the sister States. If we
are true and vigilant in our trust, within a dozen or twenty years
a majority of our own legislature will be from our school, and many
disciples will have carried its doctrines home with them to their
several States, and will have leavened thus the whole mass.
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