Jay's public career had begun two years before in connection with the revolutionary Committee of Fifty-one. He did not accept office because he loved it. He went into politics as he might have travelled on a stage-coach at the invitation of a few congenial friends, for their sake, not for his own. When he took up the work of organisation, therefore, it was with no wish to become a leader; he simply desired to guide the spirit of resistance along orderly and forceful lines. But soon he held the reins and had his foot on the brake. In drafting a reply to resolutions from a Boston town meeting, he suggested a Congress of all the Colonies, to which should be referred the disturbing question of non-importation. This letter was not only the first serious suggestion of a general Congress, placing its author intellectually at the head of the Revolutionary leaders; but the plan--which meant broader organisation, more carefully concerted measures, an enlistment of all the conservative elements, and one official head for thirteen distinct and widely separated colonies--gradually found favour, and resulted in sending the young writer as a delegate to the first Continental Congress. It was in this Congress that Jay won the right to become a constitution-maker. Of all the men of that busy and brilliant age, no one advanced more steadily in the general knowledge and favour. When he wrote the address to the people of Canada, his great ability was recognised at once; and after he composed the appeal to Ireland and to Jamaica, the famous circular letter to the Colonies, and the patriotic address to the people of his own State, his wisdom was more frequently drawn upon and more widely appreciated than ever; but he may be said to have leaped into national fame when he drafted the address to the people of Great Britain. While still ignorant of its authorship, Jefferson declared it "a production of the finest pen in America." CHAPTER II MAKING A STATE CONSTITUTION 1777 It was early spring in 1777 before John Jay, withdrawing to the country, began the work of drafting a constitution. His retirement recalls Cowper's sigh for "... a lodge in some vast wilderness, Some boundless contiguity of shade, Where rumours of oppression and deceit, Of unsuccessful and successful war, Might never reach me more."