It was a most fortunate thing for America, that the Revolutionary age, with its hardships, its trials, and its mistakes, had formed a body of statesmen capable of framing for it a durable constitution. The leading persons in the Convention which formed the Constitution had been actors, either in civil or military life, in the scenes of the Revolution. In those scenes their characters as American statesmen had been formed. When the condition of the country had fully revealed the incapacity of its government to provide for its wants, these men were naturally looked to, to construct a system which should save it from anarchy. And their great capacities, their high, disinterested purposes, their freedom from all fanaticism and illiberality, and their earnest, unconquerable faith in the destiny of their country, enabled them to found that government, which now upholds and protects the whole fabric of liberty in the States of this Union. Of course no such assembly, in that or in any other age, in this or in any other country, could be called together for such a purpose, without exhibiting a great diversity of opinions, wishes, and views. The very object for which they were assembled was of a nature to develop, to the fullest extent, the most conflicting opinions and the most opposite theories. That object was to devise a system which should best secure the permanent liberty and happiness of a vast country. What subject, in the whole range of human thought and human endeavor, could be more complex than this? What occasion, among all the diversities of human affairs, could present a wider field for honest differences of opinion, and for severe conflicts of mind with mind? Yet it should never be forgotten, as the merit of this assembly, that, collectively and individually, they were animated by the most pure and exclusive devotion to the object for which they were called together. It was this high patriotism, this deep and never-ceasing consciousness that the great experiment of republican liberty turned on the result of their labors, as on the hazard of a die, that brought at last all conflicts of interest, all diversities of opinion and feeling, into a focus of conciliation and unanimity. More than once the reader will find them on the point of separating without having accomplished any thing; and more than once he will see them recalled to their mighty task by the eloquence of some master-spirit, who knew how to touch the key-note of that patriotic feeling, which was never wholly lost in the jarring discords of debate and intellectual strife. For four months the laborious effort went on. The serene and unchanging presence of Washington presided over all. The chivalrous sincerity and disinterestedness of Hamilton pervaded the assembly with all the power of his fascinating manners. The flashing eloquence of Gouverneur Morris recalled the dangers of anarchy, which must be accepted as the alternative of an abortive experiment.