atement (Notes,
in. 1600), that when Washington took the floor in behalf of Gorham's
amendment, "it was the only occasion on which the president entered _at
all_ into the discussions of the convention." (The italics are mine.)
I have examined the manuscript at the State Department, and these
words are written in Madison's own hand in the body of the text and
inclosed in brackets. Madison was the most accurate of men. His notes
are only abstracts of what was said, but he was never absent from
the convention, and there can be no question that if Washington had
uttered the words attributed to him by Morris, a speech so important
would have been given as fully as possible, and Madison would not have
said distinctly that the Gorham amendment was the only occasion when
the president entered into the discussions of the convention.

It is, therefore, certain that Washington said nothing in the
convention except on the occasion of the Gorham amendment, and Mr.
Bancroft rightly assigns the Morris quotation to some time during the
week which elapsed between the date fixed for the assembling of the
convention and that on which a quorum of States was obtained. The
words given by Morris, if uttered at all, must have been spoken
informally in the way of conversation before there was any convention,
strictly speaking, and of course before Washington was chosen
president. Mr. Fiske, who devotes a page to these sentences from the
eulogy, describes Washington as rising from his president's chair and
addressing the convention with great solemnity. There is no authority
whatever to show that he rose from the chair to address the other
delegates, and, if he used the words quoted by Morris, he was
certainly not president of the convention when he did so. The latter
blunder, however, is Morris's own, and in making it he contradicts
himself. These are his words: "He is their president. It is a question
previous to their first meeting what course shall be pursued." In
other words, he was their president before they had met and chosen a
president. This is a fair illustration of the loose and rhetorical
character of the passage in which Washington's admonition is quoted.
The entire paragraph, with its mixture of tenses arising from the use
of the historical present which Morris's classical fancies led him to
employ, is, in fact, purely rhetorical, and has only the authority
due to performances of that character. It seems to me impossible,
therefo