family rich, and all the rest poor, substituting equal partition, the
best of all Agrarian laws. The restoration of the rights of conscience
relieved the people from taxation for the support of a religion not
theirs; for the establishment was truly of the religion of the rich, the
dissenting sects being entirely composed of the less wealthy people;
and these, by the bill for a general education, would be qualified
to understand their rights, to maintain them, and to exercise with
intelligence their parts in self-government: and all this would be
effected, without the violation of a single natural right of any
one individual citizen. To these, too, might be added, as a further
security, the introduction of the trial by jury into the Chancery
courts, which have already ingulphed, and continue to ingulph, so great
a proportion of the jurisdiction over our property.

On the 1st of June, 1779, I was appointed Governor of the Commonwealth,
and retired from the legislature. Being elected, also, one of the
Visitors of William and Mary college, a self-electing body, I effected,
during my residence in Williamsburg that year, a change in the
organization of that institution, by abolishing the Grammar school,
and the two professorships of Divinity and Oriental languages, and
substituting a professorship of Law and Police, one of Anatomy,
Medicine, and Chemistry, and one of Modern Languages; and the charter
confining us to six professorships, We added the Law of Nature and
Nations, and the Fine Arts, to the duties of the Moral professor, and
Natural History to those of the professor of Mathematics and Natural
Philosophy.

Being now, as it were, identified with the Commonwealth itself, to write
my own history, during the two years of my administration, would be to
write the public history of that portion of the revolution within this