the two most famous men present little need be said. The names of
Washington and Franklin stood for supreme intelligence and consummate
tact. Franklin had returned to this country two years before, and was
now president of Pennsylvania. He was eighty-one years of age, the
oldest man in the convention, as Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey, aged
twenty-six, was the youngest. The two most profound and original
thinkers in the company were but little older than Dayton. Alexander
Hamilton was thirty, James Madison thirty-six. Among political writers,
these two men must be ranked in the same order with Aristotle,
Montesquieu, and Locke; and the "Federalist," their joint production, is
the greatest treatise on government that has ever been written. John
Jay, who contributed a few pages to this immortal volume, had not been
sent to the convention, because New York did not wish to have it
succeed. Along with Hamilton, New York sent two commonplace men, Robert
Yates and John Lansing, who were extreme and obstinate Antifederalists;
and the action of Hamilton, who was thus prevented from carrying the
vote of his own state for any measure which he might propose, was in
this way sadly embarrassed. For another reason, Hamilton failed to
exert as much influence in the convention as one would have expected
from his profound thought and his brilliant eloquence. Scarcely any of
these men entertained what we should now call extreme democratic views.
Scarcely any, perhaps, had that intense faith in the ultimate good sense
of the people which was the most powerful characteristic of Jefferson.
But Hamilton went to the other extreme, and expressed his distrust of
popular government too plainly. His views were too aristocratic and his
preference for centralization was too pronounced to carry conviction to
his hearers. The leading part in the convention fell, therefore, to
James Madison, a young man somewhat less brilliant than Hamilton, but
superior to him in sobriety and balance of powers. Madison used to be
called the "Father of the Constitution," and it is true that the
government under which we live is more his work than that of any other
one man. From early youth his life had been devoted to the study of
history and the practice of statesmanship. He was a graduate of
Princeton College, an earnest student, familiar with all the best
literature of political science from Aristotle down to his own time, and
he had given especial attention to the hi