laws respecting their internal policy and taxation; that this right had never been forfeited or in any other way given up, but had been constantly recognized by the King and people of Great Britain; that the General Assembly of the whole Colony had the sole right and power to lay taxes on the inhabitants of the Colony; that any attempt to vest such power in any other person whatever tended to destroy British as well as American freedom; that the people of Virginia were not bound to give obedience to any law designed to impose taxation upon them other than the laws of their own General Assembly; and that any one who should, either by speaking or writing, maintain the contrary should be deemed an enemy to the Colony. In the maintenance of these resolutions Henry, lifted out of self, shouted those immortal words, “Tarquin and Cæsar had each his Brutus, Charles I. his Cromwell, and George III.”--and here he was interrupted by the cry of “Treason!”--“may profit by their example; if this be treason, make the most of it.” “This is the way,” says Bancroft, “that the fire began. Virginia rang the alarm bell for the continent.” After this, with each of the great epochs in the constitutional development following the Stamp Act, Williamsburg, either through the men born and raised in the place, or educated at its famous college of William and Mary, had an imperishable connection. It was Richard Bland, an alumnus of the college, who first announced, in a pamphlet entitled _An Enquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies_, the startling doctrine that America was no part of the kingdom of England, and had never been united with it except by the common tie of the crown. Dabney Carr, another alumnus of the college, was the patron of the resolutions in 1773 for appointment of intercolonial committees of correspondence,--the first step taken towards united action on the part of the colonies. Then it was Peyton Randolph, born in Williamsburg and educated at its college, who when the first Congress came together in 1774, offered himself as the conspicuous mark of British resentment in consenting to act as first President of the Continental Congress. In 1776, it was another alumnus of the college, Thomas Jefferson, who, in the language of Ezra Stiles, President of Yale, “poured the soul of the continent into the monumental act of Independence.” In 1786, John Tyler, Sr., born in the country near Williamsburg, and another alumnus, carried through the Virginia Legislature the proposition for a convention of the States at Annapolis. In 1787, Edmund Randolph, a native of Williamsburg and an alumnus of the college, opened the proceedings of the convention at Philadelphia by submitting “the Virginia plan” of a constitution which gave direction to its proceedings. [Illustration: JOHN TYLER, SR.]