was to have a negative on them both, and whose term of office should
also end with the year; while the judges, and all other officers,
civil or military, were either to be appointed by the governor with
the advice of the upper house, or to be chosen directly by the two
houses themselves.[242] The second pamphlet, which was in part a reply
to the first, was entitled "Address to the Convention of the Colony
and Ancient Dominion of Virginia, on the subject of Government in
general, and recommending a particular form to their consideration."
It purported to be by "A native of the Colony." Although the pamphlet
was sent into Virginia under strong recommendations from Carter
Braxton, one of the Virginian delegates in Congress, the authorship
was then unknown to the public. It advocated the formation of state
constitutions on a model far less democratic: first, a lower house,
the members of which were to be elected for three years by the people;
secondly, an upper house of twenty-four members, to be elected for
life by the lower house; thirdly, a governor, to be elected for life
by the lower house; fourthly, all judges, all military officers, and
all inferior civil ones, to be appointed by the governor.[243]

Such was the question over which the members of the committee,
appointed on the 15th of May, must soon have come into sharp conflict.
At its earliest meetings, apparently, Henry found the aristocratic
tendencies of some of his associates so strong as to give him
considerable uneasiness; and by his letter to John Adams, written on
the 20th of the month, we may see that he was then complaining of the
lack of any associate of adequate ability on his own side of the
question. When we remember, however, that both James Madison and
George Mason were members of that committee, we can but read Patrick
Henry's words with some astonishment.[244] The explanation is
probably to be found in the fact that Madison was not placed on the
committee until the 16th, and, being very young and very unobtrusive,
did not at first make his true weight felt; while Mason was not placed
on the committee until the working day just before Henry's letter was
written, and very likely had not then met with it, and may not, at the
moment, have been remembered by Henry as a member of it. At any rate,
this is the way in which our eager Virginia democrat, in that moment
of anxious conflict over the form of the future government of his
State, poured out his