Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. IN THE STATE LEGISLATES. 1782-1788. At the session of 1782 Mr. Marshall took his seat in the General Assembly of Virginia as a member from the county of Fauquier. He was then twenty-seven years of age, already in the front rank of his profession as a lawyer, but as yet without any experience in political affairs. His stirring, active life in the army, and the constantly increasing demands on his time and energies in the professional career opened to him in the courts, had left him slender opportunity to study the science of government, or even to pursue with constancy a course of general reading. But his native sagacity, aided by his observation and experience in life, especially while serving in the army under Washington, where he had observed the defects of the system established under the Articles of Confederation, and the mischiefs flowing therefrom, had led him to see and recognize the absolute necessity of a central authority in the government, which should be sufficiently strong to assert and sustain itself without awaiting the tardy and uncertain cooperation of an unwieldy constituency, like the States acting separately. With these convictions he naturally attached himself to the party which, while ardently republican, yet advocated a general government strong enough to insure the public safety, and to execute the powers with which it might be clothed, proprio vigore, independently of control by the several States. His attachment to such a union as this was warm and sincere, and was fostered by all the circumstances of his early career in life. The influence of these reflections served in his sober judgment, as he wrote in after years, to chasten and subdue "certain enthusiastic notions with which he was tinctured" in the early Revolutionary era. In...