If the Observations were what they pretend to be the text of a real speech actually spoken at the time when Pinckney was about to present his draught to the Convention they would be very good secondary evidence of the contents of the paper which he held in his hand and which he then and there presented, and thereby parted company with. But a speech which was never spoken to suppositional auditors who never heard it, is not a public declaration of the contents of another paper. The Observations are not a speech because they are cast in the form of a speech. They are simply a paper which may have been written in Charleston before the assembling of the Convention, or (possibly) in New York after the Convention had been dissolved, and whenever written Pinckney may have had before him another of the four or five constitutions which he had draughted. With the uncovering of the fact that this paper was not contemporaneous, and that it did not necessarily refer to the particular copy of the draught which Pinckney presented to the Convention on the 29th of May, the supposed value of the Observations as evidence to impeach the integrity of the draught in the State Department is blown to pieces. If this were a suit between Madison and Pinckney it might be held that Pinckney would be estopped from questioning the veracity of the paper which he wrote and made public, or the actuality of the facts which it sets forth. But an estoppel which in the words of Coke, "concludeth a man to alleage the truth" does not extend to the student of Constitutional history. He is not a party to that record and is at liberty to use it for what it may be worth against Pinckney or for Pinckney, to overthrow the draught or to substantiate the draught--to use it in any way which will tend to clear the situation from error, and authenticate the true history of the Constitution. Madison in his "Note to the Plan" regarded article VIII as "remarkable also for the circumstance that whilst it specifies the functions of the President, no provision is contained in the paper for the election of such an officer." The plain unquestionable purpose of Madison when so writing was to impress upon the American mind the improbability, the almost impossibility, of Pinckney's having neglected to provide for the election of the President while actually establishing the office and defining the functions of the officer; and hence that the paper which is so remarkable for the omission cannot be a true copy of the one presented to the Convention; and the inevitable inference from this is that the real draught, the one presented to the Convention on the 29th of May contained and must have contained, and could not have overlooked the needed provision declaring how the President should be chosen.