t and patriotism compelled to
truckle to meaner sentiments lest they get nothing; of the picked men of
the Confederacy, honourable, loyal, able, and enlightened, animated in
the first and last instance by a pure and common desire for the highest
welfare of the country, driven to war upon one another by the strength
of their conflicting opinions; ending--among the thirty-nine out of the
sixty-one delegates who signed the Constitution--in a feeling as closely
resembling general satisfaction as individual disappointments would
permit.

At first so turbulent were the conditions, that Franklin, who troubled
the Almighty but little himself, arose and suggested that the meetings
be opened with prayer. After this sarcasm, and the submission of his
mild compromise with the Confederation, he sat and watched the painted
sun behind Washington's chair, pensively wondering if the artist had
intended to convey the idea of a rise or a setting. Hamilton presented
his draft at the right moment, and the startled impression it made quite
satisfied him, particularly as his long speech to the Committee of the
Whole was received with the closest attention. Nothing could alter his
personal fascination, and even his bitterest enemies rarely left their
chairs while he spoke. The small figure, so full of dignity and
magnetizing power that it excluded every other object from their vision,
the massive head with a piercing force in every line of its features,
the dark eyes blazing and flashing with a fire that never had been seen
in the eyes of a mere mortal before, the graceful rapid gestures, and
the passionate eloquence which never in its most apparently abandoned
moments failed to be sincere and logical, made him for the hour the
glory of friend and enemy alike, although the reaction was
correspondingly bitter. Upon this occasion he spoke for six hours
without the interruption of a scraping heel; and what the Convention did
not know about the science of government before he finished with them,
they never would learn elsewhere. Although he made but this one speech,
he talked constantly to the groups surrounding him wherever he moved. To
his original scheme he had too much tact to make further allusion; but
his general opinions, ardently propounded, his emphatic reiteration of
the demoralized country's need for a national government, and of the
tyrannies inherent in unbridled democracies, wedged in many a chink.
Nevertheless, he was disgusted and