8752. UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA, Political principles.—
In the selection of our
law professor [for the University of Virginia],
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 student's 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
one school, and many disciples will have carried
its doctrines home with them to their several
States, and will have leavened thus the
whole mass.—
To James Madison. Washington ed. vii, 433.
Ford ed., x, 376.
(M.
1826)
