ebater he fought magnificently and triumphantly
for its adoption by the Convention of the State of New York in 1788.
Together with Jay and Madison he defended the fundamental principles
of the Federal Union in the remarkable series of papers known as the
"Federalist." These eighty-five papers, appearing over the signature
"Publius" in two New York newspapers between October, 1787, and April,
1788, owed their conception largely to Hamilton, who wrote more than
half of them himself. In manner they are not unlike the substantial
Whig literature of England, and in political theory they have little in
common with the Revolutionary literature which we have been considering.
The reasoning is close, the style vigorous but neither warmed by passion
nor colored by the individual emotions of the author. The "Federalist"
remains a classic example of the civic quality of our post-Revolutionary
American political writing, broadly social in its outlook, well informed
as to the past, confident--but not reckless--of the future. Many
Americans still read it who would be shocked by Tom Paine and bored
with Edmund Burke. It has none of the literary genius of either of those
writers, but its formative influence upon successive generations of
political thinking has been steadying and sound.

In fact, our citizen literature cannot be understood aright if one fails
to observe that its effect has often turned, not upon mere verbal skill,
but upon the weight of character behind the words. Thus the grave and
reserved George Washington says of the Constitution of 1787: "Let us
raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair; the event
is in the hand of God." The whole personality of the great Virginian is
back of that simple, perfect sentence. It brings us to our feet, like a
national anthem.

One American, no doubt our most gifted man of letters of that century,
passed most of the Revolutionary period abroad, in the service of his
country. Benjamin Franklin was fifty-nine in the year of the Stamp Act.
When he returned from France in 1785 he was seventy-nine, but he was
still writing as admirably as ever when he died at eighty-four. We
cannot dismiss this singular, varied, and fascinating American better
than by quoting the letter which George Washington wrote to him in
September, 1789. It has the dignity and formality of the eighteenth
century, but it is warm with tested friendship and it glows with deep
human feeling: "If to be ven