ld leaders, he was promptly to gain an ascendancy
that constituted him, almost literally, the dictator of its
proceedings, so long as he chose to hold a place in it. On the present
occasion, having finished the somewhat obscure business that had
brought him before the committee, it is probable that he instantly
disappeared from the scene, not to return to it until the following
spring, when he came back to transact business with the House itself.
For, early in May, 1765, a vacancy having occurred in the
representation for the county of Louisa, Patrick Henry, though not
then a resident in that county, was elected as its member. The first
entry to be met with in the journals, indicating his presence in the
House, is that of his appointment, on the 20th of May, as an
additional member of the committee for courts of justice. Between that
date and the 1st of June, when the House was angrily dissolved by the
governor, this young and very rural member contrived to do two or
three quite notable things--things, in fact, so notable that they
conveyed to the people of Virginia the tidings of the advent among
them of a great political leader, gave an historic impulse to the
series of measures which ended in the disruption of the British
Empire, and set his own name a ringing through the world,--not without
lively imputations of treason, and comforting assurances that he was
destined to be hanged.

The first of these notable things is one which incidentally throws a
rather painful glare on the corruptions of political life in our old
and belauded colonial days. The speaker of the House of Burgesses at
that time was John Robinson, a man of great estate, foremost among all
the landed aristocracy of Virginia. He had then been speaker for about
twenty-five years; for a long time, also, he had been treasurer of the
colony; and in the latter capacity he had been accustomed for many
years to lend the public money, on his own private account, to his
personal and political friends, and particularly to those of them who
were members of the House. This profligate business had continued so
long that Robinson had finally become a defaulter to an enormous
amount; and in order to avert the shame and ruin of an exposure, he
and his particular friends, just before the arrival of Patrick Henry,
had invented a very pretty device, to be called a "public loan
office,"--"from which monies might be lent on public account, and on
good landed security, to