calling a more general convention, to be held at
Philadelphia. At this the same party exhibited the same practices, and
with the same views of preventing a government of concord, which they
foresaw would be republican, and of forcing: through anarchy their way
to monarchy. But the mass of that convention was too honest, too wise,
and too steady, to be baffled and misled by their manoeuvres. One of
these was a form of government proposed by Colonel Hamilton, which would
have been in fact a compromise between the two parties of royalism and
republicanism. According to this, the executive and one branch of the
legislature were to be during good behavior, i.e. for life, and the
governors of the States were to be named by these two permanent organs.
This, however, was rejected; on which Hamilton left the convention, as
desperate, and never returned again until near its final conclusion.
These opinions and efforts, secret or avowed, of the advocates for
monarchy, had begotten great jealousy through the States generally;
and this jealousy it was, which excited the strong opposition to the
conventional constitution; a jealousy which yielded at last only to
a general determination to establish certain amendments, as barriers
against a government either monarchical or consolidated. In what passed
through the whole period of these conventions, I have gone on the
information of those who were members of them, being absent myself on my
mission to France.

I returned from that mission in the first year of the new government,
having landed in Virginia in December, 1789, and proceeded to New York
in March, 1790, to enter on the office of Secretary of State.
Here, certainly, I found a state of things which, of all I had ever
contemplated, I the least expected. I had left France in the first
year of her revolution, in the fervor of natural rights, and zeal for
reformation. My conscientious devotion to these rights could not be
heightened, but it had been aroused and excited by daily exercise. The
President received me cordially, and my colleagues and the circle
of principal citizens, apparently with welcome. The courtesies of
dinner-parties given me, as a stranger newly arrived among them, placed
me at once in their familiar society. But I cannot describe the wonder
and mortification with which the table conversations filled me. Politics
were the chief topic, and a preference of kingly over republican
government, was evidently the favori