ver the case
in such an assembly. There are not enough great geniuses to go around;
and if there were, it is questionable if the result would be
satisfactory. In such discussions the points which impress the more
ordinary and less far-sighted members are sure to have great value;
especially when we bear in mind that the object of such an assembly is
not merely to elaborate a plan, but to get the great mass of people,
including the brick-layers and hod-carriers, to understand it well
enough to vote for it. An ideally perfect assembly of law-makers will
therefore contain two or three men of original constructive genius, two
or three leading spirits eminent for shrewdness and tact, a dozen or
more excellent critics representing various conflicting interests, and a
rank and file of thoroughly respectable, commonplace men, unfitted for
shining in the work of the meeting, but admirably competent to proclaim
its results and get their friends and neighbours to adopt them. And in
such an assembly, even if it be such as we call ideally perfect, we must
allow something for the presence of a few hot-headed and irreconcilable
members,--men of inflexible mind, who cannot adapt themselves to
circumstances, and will refuse to play when they see the game going
against them.

[Sidenote: The men who were assembled.]

All these points are well illustrated in the assemblage of men that
framed our Federal Constitution. In its composition, this group of men
left nothing to be desired. In its strength and in its weakness, it was
an ideally perfect assembly. There were fifty-five men, all of them
respectable for family and for personal qualities,--men who had been
well educated, and had done something whereby to earn recognition in
these troubled times. Twenty-nine were university men, graduates of
Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, William and Mary, Oxford, Glasgow,
and Edinburgh. Twenty-six were not university men, and among these were
Washington and Franklin. Of the illustrious citizens who, for their
public services, would naturally have been here, John Adams and Thomas
Jefferson were in Europe; Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, and Richard Henry
Lee disapproved of the convention, and remained at home; and the
greatest man of Rhode Island, Nathanael Greene, who--one likes to
think--might have succeeded in bringing his state into the convention,
had lately died of a sun-stroke, at the early age of forty-four.

[Sidenote: James Madison.]

Of