Of the two most famous men present little need be said. The names of Washington and Franklin stood for supreme intelligence and consummate tact. Franklin had returned to this country two years before, and was now president of Pennsylvania. He was eighty-one years of age, the oldest man in the convention, as Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey, aged twenty-six, was the youngest. The two most profound and original thinkers in the company were but little older than Dayton. Alexander Hamilton was thirty, James Madison thirty-six. Among political writers, these two men must be ranked in the same order with Aristotle, Montesquieu, and Locke; and the "Federalist," their joint production, is the greatest treatise on government that has ever been written. John Jay, who contributed a few pages to this immortal volume, had not been sent to the convention, because New York did not wish to have it succeed. Along with Hamilton, New York sent two commonplace men, Robert Yates and John Lansing, who were extreme and obstinate Antifederalists; and the action of Hamilton, who was thus prevented from carrying the vote of his own state for any measure which he might propose, was in this way sadly embarrassed. For another reason, Hamilton failed to exert as much influence in the convention as one would have expected from his profound thought and his brilliant eloquence. Scarcely any of these men entertained what we should now call extreme democratic views. Scarcely any, perhaps, had that intense faith in the ultimate good sense of the people which was the most powerful characteristic of Jefferson. But Hamilton went to the other extreme, and expressed his distrust of popular government too plainly. His views were too aristocratic and his preference for centralization was too pronounced to carry conviction to his hearers. The leading part in the convention fell, therefore, to James Madison, a young man somewhat less brilliant than Hamilton, but superior to him in sobriety and balance of powers. Madison used to be called the "Father of the Constitution," and it is true that the government under which we live is more his work than that of any other one man. From early youth his life had been devoted to the study of history and the practice of statesmanship. He was a graduate of Princeton College, an earnest student, familiar with all the best literature of political science from Aristotle down to his own time, and he had given especial attention to the history of federal government in ancient Greece, and in Switzerland and Holland. At the age of twenty-five he had taken part in the Virginia convention which instructed the delegates from that state in Congress to bring forward the Declaration of Independence. During the last part of the war he was an active and influential member of Congress, where no one equalled or approached him for knowledge of English history and constitutional law. In 1784 he had returned to the Virginia legislature, and been foremost