to become subjected to the tyranny of the other. If either of these events take place, it must arise from your being greatly deficient to yourselves—from your being, like the nation of Frogs, “a discontented, variable race, weary of liberty and fond of change.” At the same time I have no hesitation in declaring, that if the one or the other must be our fate, I think the harmless, inoffensive, though contemptible Log, infinitely to be preferred to the powerful, the efficient, but all-devouring Crane. LUTHER MARTIN. _Baltimore, March 29, 1788._ LETTER OF A PLAIN DEALER, ACCREDITED TO SPENCER ROANE. Printed In The Virginia Independent Chronicle, February, 1788. Note. In October, 1787, Governor Edmund Randolph, delegate to the Federal Convention from Virginia, addressed to the Speaker of the House of Delegates a letter on the Federal Constitution. This was published in December, 1787, in both _The Virginia Gazette_ and _The Virginia Independent Chronicle_, as well as in pamphlet form at the time, and recently in Ford’s _Pamphlets on the Constitution_. Randolph had declined to give his assent to the Constitution in the Convention, but had so far altered his views in the intervening period as to make his letter on the whole an argument in favor of rather than against its adoption. Uncertain in exactly what light to regard his utterances, it was one of the few writings of the time which did not receive replies from one party or the other. The essay of “A Plain Dealer” is the only notice I have found of this letter, and deals rather more with the inconsistencies of Randolph’s views, than with the arguments advanced in the letter. Of the author, Randolph himself gives us a clue in his letter to Madison, of February 29, 1788, where he writes: A writer calling himself Plain Dealer, who is bitter in principle _vs._ the Constitution, has attacked me in the paper. I suspect the author to be Mr. Spencer Roane; and the importunities of some to me in public and private are designed to throw me unequivocally and without condition into the opposition. A Plain Dealer. The Virginia Independent Chronicle, (Number 82) WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 1788. _Mans parturiens et ecce nascitur mus._