153 



Pardon and privilege of clergy are proposed to be 

 abolislied ; bdt if the verdict be against the defendant, 

 the court in their discretion, may allow a new trial. 

 No attainder to cause a corruption of blood, or forfeit- 

 ure of dower. Slaves guilty of offences punishable in 

 others by labour, to be transported to Africa, or else- 

 where, as the circumstances of the time admit, there to 

 be continued in slavery. A rigorous regimen proposed 

 for those condemned to labour. 



Another object of the revisal is, to diffuse knowledge 

 more generally through the mass of the people This 

 bill proposes to lay off every county into small districts 

 of five or six miles square, called hundreds, and in each 

 of them to establish a school for teaching reading, 

 writing and arithmetic. The tutor to be supported by 

 the hundred, and every person in it entitled to send 

 their children three years gratis, and as much longer 

 as they please, paying for it. These schools to be un- 

 der a visitor, who is annually to choose the boy, of best 

 genius in th(3 school, of those whose parents are too 

 poor to give them further education, and to send him 

 forward to one of the grammar schools, of which twen- 

 ty are prof)osed to be erected in different parts of the 

 country, for teaching Greek, Latin, Geography and the 

 higher branches of numerical arithmetic. Of the boys 

 thus sent in one year, trial is to be n)ade at the gram- 

 mar schools one or two years, and the best genius of 

 the whole selected, and continued six years, and the re- 

 sidue disiMissed. By this means twenty of the best 

 geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually, and 

 be instructed at the f)ublic expense, so far as the gram- 

 mar schools go. At the eud of six years instruction, 

 one half are to be discontinued (from among whom the 

 grauunar schools will probably be supplied with future 

 masters) ; and the other half, who are to be chosen for 

 the superiority of their })arts and disposition, are to be 

 sent and continued three years in the study of such sci- 

 ences as tfiey shall choose, at William and Mary college, 

 the plan of which is j)roposed to be enlarged, as will be 

 Iiereafter explained, and extended to all the useful sci-« 



