They both signed the instrument notwithstanding; Hamilton under a sort of protest against its sufficiency (or rather its want of it), and Madison with apparent and, I doubt not, real cordiality. In the numbers of the "Federalist," (of which they were the principal authors,) they offered a joint and honorable testimonial to the Constitution, which became in the sequel an enduring monument to their own associated memories. Each rendered "yeoman's service" in the conventions, respectively, of New York and Virginia, to decide upon its ratification; in neither of which was the ratification probable at the beginning, and in both there is the best reason to believe that, without their powerful aid, it must have ultimately failed. In such an event the failure of the Constitution would have been next to certain. Although Gouverneur Morris's assertion that Hamilton had comparatively nothing to do with the construction of the Federal Constitution is true, yet as Madison had a greater agency in that work than any other individual, and as the obtaining the call of the Convention and the ratification of the Constitution, in which Madison and Hamilton acted the chief parts, were also the portions of the whole transaction most exposed to the action of the States and of the public mind, and therefore the most difficult of accomplishment, it may with truth be affirmed that there were not any fifty or a hundred other men taken together to whom the country was as much indebted for the Federal Constitution as to those two gentlemen. But in their subsequent treatment of that sacred instrument, which each had done so much to bring to maturity, they, unfortunately for the country, differed very widely. The Constitution was ratified and adopted in the first instance by more than the requisite number of States, and finally by the whole thirteen. General Washington was elected President. He appointed Alexander Hamilton to be Secretary of the Treasury, and James Madison was elected a member of the first Congress. The latter, although overruled in the Convention upon points which he deemed important, acquiesced in the decisions of the majority, accepted the Constitution in good faith with a determination to do all in his power, not only to secure its ratification, but to give to the people and the States the full benefit of its provisions as those were understood by them, and to do this with the same fidelity and honor with which he would perform any private arrangement to which he had made himself a party. Satisfied from numerous exhibitions of public sentiment elsewhere as well as in the State conventions, and perhaps more particularly in that of his own State, not only that there was far greater opposition in the minds of the people at large to the Constitution as it came from the hands of the Convention than he at first supposed, but that it was, in point of fact, defective in some particulars important in themselves and well