thought a series of amendments could be made, some of which he deemed highly proper and all expedient, through which a large portion of the Anti-Federalists might be conciliated without prejudice to the system which had been adopted. This course, to be useful, must, he was satisfied, be pursued at the very commencement of the new government. He devoted himself, body and mind, to that object, and we have seen some of the difficulties with which he had to contend. Although Hamilton was not personally in Congress, he was well represented, and Madison found there, besides, many other Bourbons, in the sense in which I use that term. He prepared a plan according to the views I have described; and few exhibitions of that kind can have been more interesting than to see him stand between the Federal majority in the House and the few old Anti-Federalists who were there, and avail himself of the votes of each in turn to defeat the obnoxious efforts of the other; first to arrest by Federal aid every attempt on the part of the few Anti-Federalists to mar his project by seeking amendments which he was not himself prepared to adopt, and then to frustrate by Anti-Federal votes the efforts of a majority of the Federalists (though less than a majority of the House) to defeat his entire scheme. That the only alternative was between a new convention and the adoption of amendments substantially like his, was the great fact which he labored to impress upon the minds of the Federal members. He introduced it in his public speeches with never-failing delicacy, but with sufficient clearness to be understood, and doubtless enforced it at private interviews as far as it was his habit to do such things. That important truth was the fulcrum on which he rested his lever, and he engineered his plan through the House and afterwards, as chairman of the Committee of Conference, through both Houses (the majorities in each alike unfriendly to it) with triumphant and under the circumstances most extraordinary success. The dread of another Federal Convention has never failed, when the circumstances were sufficient to justify apprehension of its call, to deter the Federalists from the adoption of projects obnoxious to the democratic spirit of the country, however anxiously desired by themselves. Pending the election of President in the House, between Jefferson and Burr, the Republicans replied to the threat of putting the Government in the hands of an officer by act of Congress, by an open, united, and firm declaration that the day such an act passed, the Middle States would arm, and that they would "call a convention to reorganize and amend the Constitution;" upon the effect of which Mr. Jefferson remarks, "the very word convention gives them the horrors, as, in the present democratical spirit of America, they fear they should lose some of the favorite morsels of the Constitution."