This is what Hamilton had to say on the danger to liberty, if permanent state legislative governments, instead of special American delegates chosen for that purpose, should even elect the American President: “The mode of appointment of the Chief Magistrate of the United States is almost the only part of the system, of any consequence, which has escaped without severe censure, or which has received the slightest mark of approbation from its opponents.” (Incidentally we recall that the mode of procedure, which is the Fifth Article, never received one word of censure from any opponent on any ground, except that it left _to government_ the ability to reassemble the “conventions” of the people. It was claimed that, even if the people found the First Article power oppressive to their individual freedom, government would never reassemble their “conventions” for the purpose of permitting them to withdraw any of those grants.) Hamilton proceeded as follows: “It was desirable that the sense of the people should operate in the choice of the person to whom so important a trust was to be confided.” (We average Americans remember that the trust of making or refusing new power to interfere with individual freedom would always be infinitely more important.) “This end will be answered by committing the right of making it, not to any preestablished body, but to men chosen by the people for the special purpose, and at the particular conjuncture.... A small number of persons, selected by their fellow citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations. It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder.... The precautions which have been so happily concerted in the system under consideration, promise an effectual security against this mischief.... And, as the electors,” like the conventions for granting or refusing national power, “chosen in each State, are to assemble and vote in the State in which they are chosen, this detached and divided situation will expose them much less to heats and ferments, which might be communicated from them to the people, than if they were all to be convened at one time, in one place.” (We recall Marshall’s echo of this in his later statement, speaking of the Fifth and Seventh Article “conventions,” “No political dreamer was ever wild enough to think of breaking down the lines which separate the states, and of compounding the American people into one common mass. Of consequence, when they act, they act _in_ their states. But the measures they adopt do not, on that account, cease to be the measures of the people themselves, or become the measures of the state governments.”)