of regarding, at that early period, as a foreign government only remotely responsible to them. We have already spoken of the settled character of their distrust of power for which there was only a remote, if any, responsibility, and of their having been trained by experience to expect only abuses from the exercise of such authority, whether in State or Church,--an experience embracing the sorrowful and well-remembered accounts of outrage and persecution against their ancestors, and the cruel oppression of the then existing generation by the distant government of the mother country. We have seen how great had been their aversion and that of their ancestors to the establishment of a general government, and with what difficulties their consent to the call of the then recent Convention had been obtained, and what care had been taken to restrict its power. It was not therefore surprising that a large majority of them should have manifested such intense dissatisfaction when a Constitution was presented for their approval containing so few, so very few safeguards for the protection of "the great and inalienable rights of freemen," as Virginia described them--of the "great and inalienable rights of mankind," as the New York Legislature styled them--points to which the masses, especially of the Anti-Federalists, were so keenly alive. These considerations and circumstances produced a sudden and extensive spirit of discontent which, as those States avowed, never would be appeased until its causes were removed, and with which Mr. Madison was well satisfied the new Government would not be able to contend unless some mode was devised to appease it. Although never a member of it, he had, in his long and persevering efforts to obtain the Constitution, "tasted the quality," so to speak, of the old Anti-Federal party, and understood the stuff of which it was composed. He knew very well that the call of Virginia upon her co-States to make the demand for amendments "a common cause" would not be _brutum fulmen_, but that the agitation for a new convention in such hands, and commenced under such favorable circumstances, with so many materials of discontent already made to their hands, would not cease until its object was gained, and what would follow no man could tell. He was not so much of a Bourbon as Hamilton; he had not pursued his thorny path through those trying scenes without learning something of the character and temper of the people, or without having his mind disabused of much that it had once entertained. No man in the country was more opposed to the call of a new convention, or more unwilling to make any amendments that would materially impair the original structure of the Constitution. The former he omitted to avow out of respect to the declared wishes of his State but the latter he repeatedly announced because it was only in harmony with his past course. But he knew that matters could not remain as they stood, and he