Other questions of a philanthropic character occupied his pen. The Synod of Albany having offered a prize for the best essay on the observance of the Sabbath, Jay competed for it with success. A more notable incident of the same sort occurred in 1828. The Savannah Anti-duelling Association offered a medal for the best argument against duelling. The committee appointed to judge the essays were: John Cummings; James M. Wayne, subsequently appointed by President Jackson a justice of the Supreme Court; R. W. Habersham, afterwards Governor of Georgia; William Law; and Matthew Hall McAllister, mayor of Savannah and an opponent of Nullification in 1832. That in 1828 these Southern men were seeking to root out the habit of duelling, and that the prize should have been awarded by them to William Jay, is a curious commentary on the connection between slavery and duelling. At this time both practices had their opponents at the South who were allowed to express their opinions. As the grip of slavery increased in strength and closed the mouth of every objector, anti-duelling sentiment was simultaneously extinguished. Both barbarous practices were to increase and to perish together. Jay's essay could then find praise among men who a few years later would not tolerate in their homes any product of his pen. In May, 1818, Jay was appointed one of the judges of Westchester County. The mention of the fact in his diary closed with the words, "May I have grace to discharge with fidelity the duties of the station." Two years later a commission from Governor Clinton made him the first judge of the county, an office which he held until 1823, when the adoption of the new constitution terminated all offices under the old one. Fenimore Cooper then wrote to him, "I see that you are unhorsed with other clever fellows." But in response to a general demand, Governor Clinton reappointed him under the new constitution, and he continued to hold office under successive governors of different parties until 1843, when he was displaced by Governor Bouck at the demand of the pro-slavery wing of the democracy. A decision of Jay's, rejecting a witness who declared his un-belief in God, occurred when De Tocqueville was in the United States, and was commented upon by the distinguished Frenchman as having been accepted by the press without comment, and as showing that the American people combined the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately that it was impossible to make them conceive of the one without the other, and that they held religion to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions. In 1862, soon after Jay's death, when an attempt was made by a pro-slavery faction in the county to remove his portrait from the court-house at White Plains, it was defeated by a protest of the members of the bar. "Many of us," they said, "were well acquainted with Judge Jay, and can speak from personal knowledge of those high qualities which have given him an historic