the astonishment. It is impossible for the man of pious
reflection not to perceive in it a finger of that Almighty hand which
has been so frequently and signally extended to our relief in the
critical stages of the revolution.

We had occasion, in a former paper, to take notice of the repeated
trials which have been unsuccessfully made in the United Netherlands
for reforming the baneful and notorious vices of their constitution. The
history of almost all the great councils and consultations held among
mankind for reconciling their discordant opinions, assuaging their
mutual jealousies, and adjusting their respective interests, is a
history of factions, contentions, and disappointments, and may be
classed among the most dark and degraded pictures which display the
infirmities and depravities of the human character. If, in a few
scattered instances, a brighter aspect is presented, they serve only as
exceptions to admonish us of the general truth; and by their lustre to
darken the gloom of the adverse prospect to which they are contrasted.
In revolving the causes from which these exceptions result, and applying
them to the particular instances before us, we are necessarily led to
two important conclusions. The first is, that the convention must have
enjoyed, in a very singular degree, an exemption from the pestilential
influence of party animosities the disease most incident to deliberative
bodies, and most apt to contaminate their proceedings. The second
conclusion is that all the deputations composing the convention were
satisfactorily accommodated by the final act, or were induced to accede
to it by a deep conviction of the necessity of sacrificing private
opinions and partial interests to the public good, and by a despair of
seeing this necessity diminished by delays or by new experiments.

FEDERALIST No. 38

The Same Subject Continued, and the Incoherence of the Objections to the
New Plan Exposed.

From The Independent Journal. Saturday, January 12, 1788.

MADISON

To the People of the State of New York:

IT IS not a little remarkable that in every case reported by ancient
history, in which government has been established with deliberation and
consent, the task of framing it has not been committed to an assembly
of men, but has been performed by some individual citizen of preeminent
wisdom and approved integrity.

Minos, we learn, was the primitive founder of the government of Crete,
as Zaleucus was o