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true court in Nineteenth Grattan, pp. 545669. Where these parties came from and to what place they have departed, no one now knows. A judge on one of the circuits in the mountains of Virginia, where the writer once practised, told a callow young member of the bar that he must not refer in his court to any of the alleged decisions of these scalawags, for they were not law, and never should be quoted as authority in his circuit. He had stuck together the leaves containing them with mucilage, so that no one could ever read them in his honor's Grattan. The present -Court of Appeals sits at Richmond, Staunton, and Wytheville. On the 1 3th of February, 1864, a number of persons claiming to represent Virginia assembled in convention at Alexandria, just outside of the smoke of the guns of the con tending Union and Confederate forces, and adopted what they were pleased to call a Constitution for the State. This Constitu tion recognized the separation of West Vir ginia; and the boundary-lines it made have never yet been changed. By the nineteenth section of the Fourth Article, slavery was for ever abolished.1 A convention which as sembled on the 3d of December, 1867, adopted another constitution, which was submitted to the people July 6, 1869, by order of Gen. 1 Acts 1866-67, P 764-
Edward R. S. Canby, commanding military District No. i (Virginia); and it was ratified.1 This is still the Constitution. Section 2 of Article XII. provided that in the year 1888 the question " Shall there be a convention to revise the Constitution and amend the same? " should be submitted to the people. This was done, and a new convention voted down by an immense majority. All of the constitutions vacated the commissions of the judges of the Supreme Court; but whenever they sought re-election they were reinstated on the bench, i & 2 Va. Cases (reports of the decisions of the General Court) are splendid authority on criminal law, and the decisions of the Supreme Court of Appeals on consti tutional questions deserve and receive high consideration everywhere. Virginia is again united and prosperous, without a cloud to obscure the brightness of the future, as well for her people as her judi ciary. Her history all the world knows; and if once "the few ruled,"2 one must not lament at all over the past conditions of a State that gave us Washington and Jefferson and Madison and Monroe and Henry and Mason and Marshall and Richard Henry Lee. 1 Code of Virginia, 1873, pp. 26, 27. - Prof Andrew C. McLaughhn, of the University oí Michigan.
