From the beginning to the end of its debates, the Convention breathed the same patriotic fervor. Amidst all difference in details, and above the persistent and sinister contest for the equal representation of the States, great and small, the sentiment of Unity found constant utterance. I have already mentioned Madison and Hamilton, who wished a National Government; but others were not less decided. Gouverneur Morris began early by explaining the difference between “Federal” and “National.” The former implied “a mere compact, resting on the good faith of the parties”; the latter had “a complete and compulsive operation.”[39] Constantly this impassioned statesman protested against State pretensions, insisting that the States were originally “nothing more than colonial corporations,”[40] and exclaiming, “We cannot annihilate, but we may perhaps take out the teeth of the serpents.”[41] Wilson was a different character,--gentle by nature, but informed by studies in jurisprudence and by the education brought from his Scottish home. He was for a National Government, and did not think it inconsistent with the “lesser jurisdictions” of States, which he would preserve;[42] he would not “extinguish these planets,” but keep them “within their proper orbits for subordinate purposes.”[43] He was too much of a jurist to admit, “that, when the Colonies became independent of Great Britain, they became independent also of each other,” and he insisted that they became independent, “not individually, but unitedly.”[44] Elbridge Gerry, of Massachusetts, was as strong on this point as Gouverneur Morris, insisting that “we never were independent States, were not such now, and never could be, even on the principles of the Confederation.”[45] Rufus King, also of Massachusetts, touched a higher key, when he wished that “every man in America” should be “secured in all his rights,” and that these should not be “sacrificed to the phantom of State sovereignty.”[46] Good words, worthy of him who in the Continental Congress moved the prohibition of Slavery in the national territories.[47] And Charles Pinckney, of South Carolina, said, in other words of precious significance, that “every freeman has a right to _the same protection and security_,” and then again, that “equality is the leading feature of the United States.”[48] Under such influences the Constitution was adopted by the Convention.