For other reasons, too, the people should not be charged with designing to sanction any of the secret intentions of the convention. When the states sent delegates to the convention, no avowal was made of any intention to give any national sanction to slavery. The articles of confederation had given none; the then existing state constitutions gave none; and it could not have been reasonably anticipated by the people that any would have been either asked for or granted in the new constitution. If such a purpose had been avowed by those who were at the bottom of the movement, the convention would doubtless never have been held. The avowed objects of the convention were of a totally different character. Commercial, industrial and defensive motives were the prominent ones avowed. When, then, the constitution came from the hands of such a convention, unstained with any legal or tangible sanction of slavery, were the people--who, from the nature of the case, could not assemble to draft one for themselves--bound either to discard it, or hold themselves responsible for all the secret intentions of those who had drafted it? Had they no power to adopt its legal meaning, and that alone! Unquestionably they had the power; and, as matter of law, as well as fact, it is equally unquestionable that they exercised it. Nothing else than the constitution, as a legal instrument, was offered to them for their adoption. Nothing else was legally before them that they could adopt. Nothing else, therefore, did they adopt.