The significance of the term "council of revision" was not known to the friend who arrayed the Observations against the draught and may not have been to Judge Duer. Neither did they know that in the judgment and understanding of the Convention the President with powers and duties defined as they were defined was in legal effect the embodiment of the council of revision. But Madison knew it, or had known it. He too had personally participated in the work by his repeated efforts to engraft a council of revision on the Constitution, and his knowledge he had written down in his own words. Certainly he had no right to attack Pinckney through his unnamed friend. Certainly he had no right to leave Judge Duer to infer that the discrepancies noted below had received his scrutiny and approval. His Journal he knew would be published, he was even then providing for it in his will, and when published it would contradict the discrepancy noted below and sustain the copy of the draught which he was attacking. The obvious explanation is that Madison's failing memory failed to record his own words, "the Convention gave the executive alone, without the judiciary, the revisionary control of the laws," and Pinckney's express declaration as early as the 6th of June that "he had been at first" in favor of a council of revision but for reasons stated had changed his mind. And let it not be supposed that Madison deliberately intended to deceive or that he was actuated by a malignant wish to deprive Pinckney of any thing which he really believed was actually his due. Madison was then an old man--a very old man--in his 85th year who had lived long and under the strain of great labors and intense excitements and withering anxieties. He was too old and too weary, and too strongly prejudiced to change his mind in a minute or to reverse the judgment of many years by an investigation de novo. The word "phenomenon" in his letter to Judge Duer reveals his state of mind and well explains his acts. That the boy who had lodged in the same house with him in Philadelphia, the youngest member of the Convention as he believed, who was always talking about his draught, whom he disliked and underrated, that he should appear in 1818 as the chief contributor to, as the principal draughtsman of the Constitution of the United States was indeed to him a phenomenon. It was something which he could not really believe. There is a note of contrition when he writes that "the length of the document laid before the Convention and other circumstances prevented my taking a copy at the time." He really believed that if he had procured and kept a copy of the draught which Pinckney laid before the Convention, it would have blown to pieces this wild pretentious claim which he had laid before the Secretary of State.