his pleasure. A century later, Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence mentioned the abuse of the power to prorogue the legislature as one of the causes of the Revolution. When the colonies became states, their constitutions forbade the governor to adjourn the assembly, and the provision is found in every state constitution to-day. Suddenly Charles surprised the Virginians by giving them and their country to two of his favorites, Lord Arlington and Lord Culpepper. The Virginians were not consulted. The grant was for thirty-one years. At this time the colony had a population of forty thousand. After all, the House of Burgesses seemed to be of little account. At this critical moment an Indian war broke out, and the frontier was ravaged, but Berkeley would do nothing. He feared to call out the militia lest it might turn against him for his high-handed acts. Driven to self-defense, the people volunteered, organized the militia, and chose Nathaniel Bacon to lead them. He dispersed the Indians, but while fighting for the colony was declared a rebel by Berkeley. The wrath of the people now broke out; the governor withdrew his proclamation, but continued hostile to Bacon and his friends. Bacon was elected to the assembly, and there aided in preparing a memorial to the king setting forth the governor's tyranny. The savages were again attacking the settlements, and Bacon again led in a campaign against them. Civil war broke out. Jamestown was burned, the people willingly setting fire to their own buildings rather than submit to Berkeley's misrule. Suddenly Bacon died of fever, and affairs quieted down, but not before the governor had hanged above twenty people for treason. His act was disapproved by the king; he was recalled and sternly reprimanded for his folly and cruelty. The royal disfavor was a fatal blow to Berkeley, who died soon after. The Virginians attributed the whole trouble to the governor's treatment of the House of Burgesses. They insisted that the house had fought for their rights and liberties. Bacon was the first Englishman in America to take arms for the ancient and undoubted rights of the people of the colony. His death, in 1676, was remembered as that of a martyr for liberty. Other causes contributing to Bacon's rebellion were the low price of tobacco; the scar

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city of money in the colony; the excessive prices charged by English merchants for their goods under the monopoly which the trade laws of Parliament established, and above all the prorogation of the assembly and the high poll taxes which the House of Burgesses felt obliged to levy in order to meet the obligations which the king's transfer of the colony to Arlington and Culpepper involved. Bacon's rebellion subsided, and the more quickly under the stern hand of the colonial governor, but memories of it lingered among the people, fell like seeds on republican soil, and sprang up among the elemental ideas of liberty in the Old Dominion. When, just a hundred years after the outbreak of the rebellion, the Declaration of Independence, written by a Virginian, was given to the world, the seeds sown in Bacon's struggle had blossomed, and the fruit was to mature soon after in the constitutions of government which the American people framed and adopted.

The weary century was filled with political lessons, not only for the Virginians, but for the people of the other colonies as well; and first came the hard experiences under the navigation acts which began to bear down the Americans in 1676. Much of the history of the next hundred years is of the king's attempts to execute these acts in the colonies. Here were involved questions of the power of the assemblies and of the prerogative of the crown. Governor Berkeley's hard treatment of the Baconian party transformed many of its opponents into sympathizers. In the resolution of political and social forces in Virginia, which came more or less slowly after the rebellion had been stamped out, it was discovered that the elements of the struggle had not perished. The House of Burgesses still stood for one idea, one political system, and the royal governor for another. Even the removal and recall of Berkeley, in 1679, did not bring permanent harmony. Berkeley's successors, among whom now and then was one who made Virginia his home, looked upon the province as a means of founding or mending their fortunes. Their sole thought was to put money in their purses. Ceaseless contentions with the assemblies followed. The governor was ever appealing to the king; the assemblies ever were relying on the firm

republican support of the electors. Arlington and Culpepper played at governorship, and lost the game.

The navigation acts speedily brought a train of disasters upon the colony. They cut off its trade with the whole world, excepting England. One effect, in 1680, was an overproduction of tobacco and a glut in the market. The navigation laws forbade opening up a new outlet, and the assembly was forced to attempt the impossible to regulate prices, and the areas which from time to time should be planted to tobacco. The result was the Plantcutters' Riot of 1681-82, which overspread the lower plantations. The young tobacco plants were destroyed by the mob, till the militia having been called out and several plantcutters hanged, the excitement subsided. No one seems to have suggested the repeal of the navigation act, and the consequent extension of the market.

The assembly stoutly maintained its rights to levy taxes, and the governors breathed no objection aloud so long as the appropriations included a fat salary for themselves. Even a small one seemed satisfactory to the notorious Lord Howard of Effingham, who decided to remain in England, draw his salary as governor, and rule Virginia through a deputy, choosing Francis Nicholson, lately of New York, who departed when the Andros government came abruptly to an end under Jacob Leisler. Nicholson came, and a merry time he had in his attempt to rule the Virginians. It was at the beginning of his administration, in 1689, that James Blair, a Scotch clergyman, who had been appointed to the charge of the church in Virginia, arrived. He had powers akin to those of a bishop, and exercised judicial functions in ecclesiastical cases. Two years after his coming he entered upon the noble work of founding a college, and after two years' labor in the colony and in England, raised a sufficient sum to start the institution in 1693, called in its charter William and Mary College. It was located at Williamsburg, a town founded in the year of the founding of the college. Between Nicholson and Blair there raged a conflict of principles and practices which could not be harmonized. Nicholson was recalled in 1705.

The first commencement was held in 1700, fifty-seven

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years before the first held in any other college south of New England. William and Mary speedily became the intellectual center of the South. It was the first college in America that assumed the methods and ways of a modern university: instruction by lectures, the elective system of studies, the teaching of history and political science by a special professor, and the adoption of a non-sectarian policy. Among its famed professors, during the years just before the American Revolution, was George Wythe, who became chancellor of Virginia. He was the first professor of municipal law in America, but he is better known as one of that incomparable body of men who framed the Constitution of the United States at Philadelphia in 1787. Among those who read law with him were Jefferson and Madison, John Marshall and Henry Clay. William and Mary College trained may young men who attained great eminenceamong them Jefferson, Marshall, James Monroe, and John Tyler.

Before Francis Nicholson vanishes from the scene, let us remember that he was one of the first men to plan a union of all the English colonies, in 1689. It was on a military basis, and was solely to protect them against the power of New France. William III. thought so highly of it that he urged its adoption; but the time for American union had not yet come.

In 1710 a new governor arrived in Virginia, a man of a different type from any of his predecessors--Alexander Spotswood. Though differing frequently with the assembly, his intercourse with that republican body was more harmonious than the colony had ever known to exist between the executive and the legislative. He took a great interest in the material progress of Virginia, and especially the development of its resources. He encouraged the planting of vineyards, the introduction of fruits, and the establishing of iron furnaces. No other royal governor in America. equaled him in such undertakings. Had his industrial

*The college in Philadelphia, afterward (1779) named the University of the State of Pennsylvania, and in 1791 the University of Pennsylvania. See Franklin and the University of Pennsylvania, Washington, Government Printing Office, 1893.

sagacity been shared by other governors, and especially by the crown and the ministry, the Revolution of 1776 would have been long delayed. But the spirit of the navigation acts was deadening to all such efforts.

Virginia lay at a safe distance from New France; indeed, the middle colonies and New England were her ramparts. Her people were thus exempted from the terrible strain which weighed upon their brethren farther north. The Virginia mind ripened all these years, and fruited in that wonderful body of men who led the American Revolution. The continental aspects of American life were clear to Jefferson and Washington and their associates. The philosopher of the Revolution was a Virginian, as one would expect from the history of America. Jefferson personified a mental type rare in the New World as in the Old. But such a man as he could not have been produced outside of Virginia. If we would trace the history of the American mind from the time of the settlement at Jamestown, 1607, to the time of the inauguration of our present national government, 1789, we need not go outside Virginia. Its development was normal, in so far as that of any colony could be under English law during that time in the world's history. The New England mind may have been theologically more subtle, but it was no more robust or cosmopolitan. The middle colonies were amidst too fierce an international turmoil, the conflict between France and England for the possession of the continent, to permit the growth of that philosophic calm which distinguishes Jefferson as an exponent of American political thought.

With the outbreak of the final struggle between England and France, in 1753, Virginia, like her colonial neighbors, rises to new importance and emerges from provincialism. Henceforth her local contests are insignificant, and she is swept into the grand current of continental events. The century since Bacon's rebellion was swiftly closing, and republican ideas were springing up like armed men. We must turn from the tide-water plains and the rich valleys of the Old Dominion, and follow her sons into that greater world in which they were to play the leading part in the founding of a new nation.