When one instrument is fashioned after another the natural and even unconscious action of the mind is to correct and improve. It is a going forward toward a desirable result. To fashion the second instrument after the first but in such a manner that in many details there would be an unfailing inferiority would be a going backward. This inferiority in detail runs through the Pinckney draught as has repeatedly been shown before. When Sparks wrote the word "artful" he used the right word, the word which controlled the situation--"in so artful a manner as to make it seem the original" most accurately defines what Pinckney did in Charleston in 1818 if he then fabricated a new draught. Of course such a fabrication was possible but it would have required a literary forger with a genius for literary forgery to have taken the Committee's draught and given these artless imperfections--these delicate touches of inferiority to the copy for the State Department. To the specific charge that Pinckney must have sketched his draught "in so artful a manner as to make it seem the original" if it was not what he had represented it to be, Madison made no reply. Sparks had narrowed the issue to this, "Did the Committee follow Pinckney's draught or did Pinckney use the Committee's?" But Madison evaded the issue. Sparks had shown that the Committee did not confine themselves to results arrived at after discussion in the Convention; but that they had incorporated in their draught "important provisions not found in either" set of resolutions, and he called Madison's attention "to the extraordinary coincidence between the two draughts;" and he added that he could not "account for the Committee following any draught so servilely, especially with Randolph's resolutions before them, and Randolph himself one of their number." It was for Madison then to meet this issue and show definitely where the Committee got the many new provisions of their draught, important and unimportant, if they did not get them from the Pinckney draught. On the 25th of November, 1831, Madison replied at length to Sparks' letter but he said not a word about the draught of the Committee or of Pinckney's letter to the Secretary of State. His answer was in effect, "Impossible!"