THE TOWN OF BEDFORD. 



79 



Paris in September, 1783; and returned to America in 1784, having 

 been previously appointed Secretary of State for Foreign affairs. He 

 became Chief Justice of the United States in 1789, and in 1794 was 

 appointed Minister to England; was Governor of the State of New 

 York from 1795 to 1801, after which he retired from public life."" 



A writer truthfully says, " He was one of the wisest statesmen and 

 purest patriots of the days of the war of Independence, and our country 

 has no purer name inscribed on the list of her worthies." The Supreme 

 Court of the State being in session in New York, at the time of his 

 death, the gentlemen of the bar held a meeting and adopted the fol- 

 lowing resolutions : " Resolved that the members of this bar are im- 

 pressed with deep grief upon the decease of their illustrious brother 

 John Jay. They find however, a consolation in the reflection, that his 

 conduct through a long and useful life, has given a lustre to our profes- 

 sion, and to this bar; and that while his character for private virtues 

 and public worth has justly endeared him to the nation, his patriotism, 

 his great talents as a statesman, and his great acquirements as a jurist, 

 his eminent purity as a Christian, and his probity as a man, all unite to 

 present him to the public as an example whose radiance points to the 

 attainment of excellence." 



The memory of this great and good man will be embalmed in the 

 heart of every true friend of liberty, virtue and the honor and prosperity 

 of the State of New York and her civil institutions, and as long as the 

 history of this State and Nation shall be known and read. h 



ANECDOTE OF JOHN JAY. 



One of the purest of American statesmen was John Jay. He was a patriot in 

 the highest sense of the much-abused word. But he was more than a statesman, 

 and was gifted with a higher virtue than patriotism, for he was a Christian. A 

 paragraph in a letter written to his wife when about retiring from the governor- 

 ship of New York, discloses the nature of the man. "A few years," he writes, 

 "will put us all in the dust, and then it will be of more importance to me to 

 have governed myself than to have governed a State." 



The self-sacrificing character of Mr. Jay's patriotism was exhibited by his 

 acceptance of the office of Minister to England to negotiate the treaty of 1794. 

 The bitter feelings between Great Britain and the United States, created by the 

 Revolutionary "War, were so strong as to interfere with the commercial pros- 

 perity of the youthful nation. Mr. Jay, among other statesmen, recognized that 

 it was necessary that a treaty should be made with England. Urging his views 

 upon some friends, he said that so intense was the popular hostility towards the 

 English, that the Minister who should negotiate the treaty would be an object 



a Doc. Col. Hist, of N. Y., vol. viii: p. 469. 



b Ssammonds Political Hist, of N. Y., Vol. ii, p. 310. 



