From immediate extravagance Massachusetts was saved by the leaders who, knowing the popular excitement, feared lest the convention should be carried too fast into disorder, and for that reason selected representatives who could be trusted to resist emotion. When George Cabot was chosen as the head of the State delegation, the character of the body was fixed. The selection of Cabot did not please the advocates of action. Pickering wrote to Lowell suggesting doubts whether Cabot was the fittest choice.[413] Lowell replied that he shared these doubts, and that in consequence he had been led to oppose the convention altogether, because it would not withdraw the State resources from the general government.[414] Cabot, he said, was “most reluctantly dragged in like a conscript to the duty of a delegate;” he had always been despondent as to the course of public affairs, and felt no confidence in the possibility of awakening the people to their true disease,--which was not the war or the Union, but democracy. Lowell did not know “a single bold and ardent man” among the Massachusetts or Connecticut delegates. In the “Centinel” of December 7 he described Cabot’s tendencies in language evidently intended as a warning to Cabot himself:-- “There are men who know that our troubles are not the offspring of this war alone, and will not die with it. But they despair of relief, and think resistance unavailing. They consider the people in their very nature democratic, and that nothing but the severity of their sufferings has driven them from those men and that system out of which have grown all our evils; that should they be restored to that state of prosperity which they once enjoyed, the same passions and opinions would diffuse themselves through the country, and the same course of conduct be again followed out.”