The style of the Constitution, we owe to Pinckney. Behind him, perhaps, was Chief Justice Jay, whose hand appears in the first Constitution of New York, but none of the men connected with the Convention, not even Hamilton, had attained what we may term the style of the Constitution--the clear, concise, declarative, imperative style which seems a characteristic part of the great instrument. Pinckney appreciated the difference between a constitution and a statute and in maintaining this difference his hand rarely erred. The Committee of Detail corrected Pinckney's language, occasionally, and sometimes rendered the meaning more certain by amplification but whenever they departed from his draught, there is an immediate falling off in style. A flagrant instance of this is in article IX, sections 2 and 3. In the hands of the Committee the provision relating to disputes and controversies between States expands into a string of minor provisions containing more than 400 words with all the involved petty particularities of an incoherent statute. _Exempli gratia_, "The Senate shall also assign a day for the appearance of the parties, by their agents before that house. The agents shall be directed to appoint, by joint consent, commissions or judges to constitute a court for hearing and determining the matter in question. But if the agents cannot agree, the Senate shall name three persons out of each of the several States; and from the list of such persons, each party shall alternately strike out one, until the number shall be reduced to thirteen; and from that number not less than seven, nor more than nine, names, as the Senate shall direct, shall in their presence, be drawn out by lot; and the persons whose names shall be so drawn, or any five of them, shall be,", etc., etc. The person who remembers that this and more like it, was actually prepared and printed and reported to the Convention as a proposed part of the Constitution of the United States, may well wonder what kind of a Constitution the Committee of Detail would have framed, if they had not had Pinckney to block out their work for them.