Here the answer must be left to others. It is not for me to give it. I
may, however, more readily than others, suggest the offices in which I
have served. I came of age in 1764, and was soon put into the nomination
of justices of the county in which I live, and at the first election
following I became one of its representatives in the legislature.
I was thence sent to the old Congress.
Then employed two years, with Mr. Pendleton and Mr. Wythe, on the
revisal and reduction to a single code of the whole body of the British
statutes, the acts of our Assembly, and certain parts of the common law.
Then elected Governor.
Next to the legislature, and to Congress again.
Sent to Europe as Minister Plenipotentiary.
Appointed Secretary of State to the new government.
Elected Vice President, and
President.
And lastly, a Visitor and Rector of the University.
In these different offices, with scarcely any interval between them, I
have been in the public service now sixty-one years; and during the far
greater part of the time, in foreign countries or in other States. Every
one knows how inevitably a Virginia estate, goes to ruin, when the owner
is so far distant as to be unable to pay attention to it himself; and
the more especially, when the line of his employment is of a character
to abstract and alienate his mind entirely from the knowledge necessary
to good, and even to saving management.
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