"In these sentiments, sir, I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general government necessary for us, and there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people, if well administered, and I believe further that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other. I doubt, too, whether any other convention we can obtain may be able to make a better Constitution. For when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom you inevitably assemble with those men all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an assembly can a perfect production be expected? It therefore astonishes me, sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does.... Thus, I consent, sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure that it is not the best. The opinions I have had of its errors I sacrifice to the public good, I have never whispered a syllable of them abroad. Within these walls they were born and here they shall die. If every one of us in returning to our constituents were to report the objections he has had to it and endeavour to gain partisans in support of them, we might prevent its being generally received, and thereby lost all the salutary effects and great advantages resulting naturally in our favour among foreign nations as well as among ourselves from our real or apparent unanimity. "On the whole, sir, I cannot help expressing a wish that every member of the convention who may still have objections to it, would with me, on this occasion doubt a little of his own infallibility--and to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument." Truly this spirit of Doctor Franklin could be profitably invoked in this day and generation, when nations are so intolerant of the ideas of other nations. As the members, moved by Franklin's humorous and yet moving appeal, came forward to subscribe their names, Franklin drew the attention of some of the members to the fact that on the back of the President's chair was the half disk of a sun, and, with his love of metaphor, he said that painters had often found it difficult to distinguish in their art a rising from a setting sun. He then prophetically added: "I have often and often in the course of the sessions and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears in its issues, looked at that behind the President without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting. But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun."