court, or any British elementary work on law, be read as an authority. The proposition was immensely popular among the members of the Assembly. More than four fifths of them declared their determination to vote for it. Clay was as fiery a patriot as any of them; but he would not permit his state to make itself ridiculous by a puerile and barbarous demonstration. He was young and ambitious, but he would not seek popularity by joining, or even acquiescing, in a cry which offended his good sense. Without hesitation he left the Speaker's chair to arrest this absurd clamor. He began by moving as an amendment that the exclusion of British decisions and opinions from the courts of Kentucky should apply only to those which had been promulgated after July 4, 1776, as before that date the American colonies were a part of the British dominion, and Americans and English were virtually one nation, living substantially under the same laws. Then he launched into a splendid panegyric upon the English common law, and an impassioned attack upon the barbarous spirit which would “wantonly make wreck of a system fraught with the intellectual wealth of centuries.” His speech was not reported, but it was described in the press of the time as one of extraordinary power and beauty, and it succeeded in saving for Kentucky the treasures of English jurisprudence.
Other demonstrations of patriotism on his part were not wanting. In December, 1808, when the
