our political leaders and public functionaries must be men who are influenced alone by an ardent desire to promote the general good of our whole country--aiming at holy ends to be accomplished by righteous means. Such were the sages of the American Revolution. The patriarch Stephen Hopkins stood among them in all the dignity of an honest man. He was born at Scituate, Rhode Island, on the 7th of March 1707. He was the son of William Hopkins a thorough farmer whose father, Thomas Hopkins, was one of the pioneers of that province. The school advantages of Stephen were limited to the elementary branches of an English education, then very superficially taught. By the force of his own exertions he perfected this embryo basis and reared upon it a magnificent superstructure. He spent all his leisure hours in exploring the fields of science. At his majority he was a farmer in easy circumstances and devoted a portion of the day and his quiet evenings to the acquisition of useful knowledge. No profession not literary affords so much facility for mental improvement as that of agriculture. Independent tillers of the soil--if you are not intelligent the fault is your own. The time was when ignorance was winked at. That dark age has passed away. Now common sense and reason command all to drink at the scholastic fountain. Mr. Hopkins acquired a thorough knowledge of mathematics at an early age and became an expert surveyor. At the age of nineteen he was placed in the ranks of men by marrying Sarah Scott whose paternal great grandfather was the first Quaker who settled in Providence. She died the mother of seven children. In 1755 he married the widow Anna Smith a pious member of the Society of Friends. In 1731 he was appointed Town Clerk and Clerk of the Court and Proprietaries of the county. The next year he was elected to the General Assembly where he continued for six consecutive years. In 1735 he was elected to the Town Council and for six years was President of that body. In 1736 he was appointed a Justice of the Peace and a Judge of the Common Pleas Court. In 1739 he was elevated to the seat of Chief Justice of that branch of the judiciary. During the intervals of these public duties he spent much of his time in surveying. He regulated the streets of his native town and those of Providence and made a projected map of each. He was the Proprietary surveyor for the county of Providence and prepared a laborious index of returns of all land west of the seven mile line, which still continues to be a document of useful reference. Beauty and precision marked all his draughts and calculations.