shoot of the English people in setting up a government for
themselves. The stores of knowledge he drew upon must needs have been
laid up in the years of quiet study at home before he entered upon
public life. For there was no congressional library then where a member
could "cram" for debate; and--though Philadelphia already had a fair
public library--the member who was armed at all points must have
equipped himself before entering Congress. In this respect Madison
probably had no equal, except Hamilton, and possibly Ellsworth. To the
need of such a library, however, he and others were not insensible. As
chairman of a committee he reported a list of books "proper for the use
of Congress," and advised their purchase. The report declared that
certain authorities upon international law, treaties, negotiations, and
other questions of legislation were absolutely indispensable, and that
the want of them "was manifest in several Acts of Congress." But the
Congress was not to be moved by a little thing of that sort.

The attitude of his own State sometimes embarrassed him in the
satisfactory discharge of his duty as a legislator. The earliest
distinction he won after entering Congress was as chairman of a
committee to enforce upon Mr. Jay, then minister to Spain, the
instructions to adhere tenaciously to the right of navigation on the
Mississippi in his negotiations for an alliance with that power. Mr.
Madison, in his dispatch, maintained the American side of the question
with a force and clearness to which no subsequent discussion of the
subject ever added anything. He left nothing unsaid that could be said
to sustain the right either on the ground of expediency, of national
comity, or of international law; and his arguments were not only in
accordance with his own convictions, but with the instructions of the
Assembly of his own State. It was a question of deep interest to
Virginia, whose western boundary at that time was the Mississippi. But
Virginia soon afterward shifted her position. The course of the war in
the Southern States in the winter of 1780-81 aroused in Georgia and the
Carolinas renewed anxiety for an alliance with Spain. The fear of their
people was that, in case of the necessity for a sudden peace while the
British troops were in possession of those States or parts of them, they
might be compelled to remain as British territory under the application
of the rule of _uti possidetis_. It was urged, therefore, that