Part 3 (2/2)
When the committee on detail had made its report on August 6, the convention proceeded for over a month to debate it with the most minute care. Every day for five weeks, for five hours each day, the members studied and debated with meticulous care every sentence of the proposed Const.i.tution. Time does not suffice even for the barest statement of the many interesting questions which were thus discussed, but they nearly ran the whole gamut of const.i.tutional government. Many fanciful ideas were suggested but with unvarying good sense they were rejected. Some of the results were, under the circ.u.mstances, curious. For example, although it was a convention of comparatively young men, and although the convention could have taken into account the many successful young men in public life in Europe-as, for example, William Pitt-they put a disqualification upon age by providing that a Representative must be twenty-five years of age, a Senator thirty years of age, and a President thirty-five years of age. When it was suggested that young men could learn by admission to public life, the sententious reply was made that, while they could, they ought not to have their education at the public expense.
The debates proceeded, however, in better temper, and almost the only question that again gave rise to pa.s.sionate argument was that of slavery. The extreme Southern States declared that they would never accept the new plan ”except the right to import slaves be untouched.” This question was finally compromised by agreeing that the importation of slaves should end after the year 1808. It however left the slave population then existing in a state of bondage, and for this necessary compromise the nation seventy-five years later was to pay dearly by one of the most destructive civil wars in the annals of mankind.
August was now drawing to a close. The convention had been in session for more than three months. Of its work the public knew nothing, and this notwithstanding the acute interest which the American people, not merely facing the peril of anarchy, but actually suffering from it, must have taken in the convention. Its vital importance was not under-estimated. While its builders, like all master builders, did ”build better than they knew,” yet it cannot be said that they under-estimated the importance of their labours. As one of their number, Gouveneur Morris said: ”The whole human race will be affected by the proceedings of this convention.” After it adjourned one of its greatest partic.i.p.ants, James Wilson, of Pennsylvania, said:
”After the lapse of six thousand years since the creation of the world, America now presents the first instance of a people a.s.sembled to say deliberately and calmly and to decide leisurely and peaceably on the form of government by which they will bind themselves and their posterity.”
In the absence of any authentic information, the rumour spread through the colonies that the convention was about to reconst.i.tute a monarchy by inviting the second son of George III, the Bishop of Osnaburg, to be King of the United States; and these rumours became so persistent as to evoke from the silent convention a semi-official denial. There is some reason to believe that a minority of the convention did see in the restoration of a const.i.tutional monarchy the only solution of the problem.
On September 8 the committee had finally considered and, after modifications, approved the draft of the Committee on Detail, and a new committee was thereupon appointed ”to revise the style of and arrange the articles that had been agreed to by the House.” This committee was one of exceptional strength. There were Dr. William Samuel Johnson, a graduate of Oxford and a friend of his great namesake, Samuel Johnson; Alexander Hamilton, Gouveneur Morris, a brilliant mind with an unusual gift for lucid expression; James Madison, a true scholar in politics, and Rufus King, an orator who, in the inflated language of the day, ”was ranked among the luminaries of the present age.”
The convention then adjourned to await the final revision of the draft by the Committee on Style.
On September 12 the committee reported. While it is not certain, it is believed that its work was largely that of Gouveneur Morris.
September 13 the printed copies of the report of the Committee on Style were ready, and three more days were spent by the convention in carefully comparing each article and section of this final draft.
On September 15 the work of drafting the Const.i.tution was regarded as ended, and it was adopted and ordered to be engrossed for signing.
It may be interesting at this point to give the result of their labours as measured in words, and if the framers of the Const.i.tution deserve the plaudits of posterity in no other respect they do in the remarkable self-restraint which those results revealed.
The convention had been in session for 81 continuous days. Probably they had consumed over 300 hours in debate. If their debates had been fully reported, they would probably have filled at least fifty volumes, and yet the net result of their labours consisted of about 4,000 words, 89 sentences, and about 140 distinct provisions. As the late Lord Bryce, speaking in this age of unbridled expression, both oral and printed, so well has said:
”The Const.i.tution of the United States, including the amendments, may be read aloud in twenty-three minutes. It is about half as long as Saint Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians, and one-fourth as long as the Irish Land Act of 1881. History knows few instruments which in so few words lay down equally momentous rules on a vast range of matters of the highest importance and complexity.”
Even including the nineteen amendments, the Const.i.tution, after one hundred and thirty-five years of development, does not exceed 7,000 words. What admirable self-restraint! Possibly single opinions of the Supreme Court could be cited which are as long as the whole doc.u.ment of which they are interpreting a single phrase. This does not argue that the Const.i.tution is an obscure doc.u.ment, for it would be difficult to cite any political doc.u.ment in the annals of mankind that was so simple and lucid in expression. There is nothing Johnsonese about its style. Every word is a word of plain speech, the ordinary meaning of which even the man in the street knows. No tautology is to be found and no attempt at ornate expression. It is a model of simplicity, and as it flows through the reaches of history it will always excite the admiration of those who love clarity and not rhetorical excesses. One can say of it as Horace said of his favourite Spring:
O, fons Bandusiae, splendidior vitro. Dulce digne mero, non sine floribus.
If I be asked why, if this be true, it has required many lengthy opinions of the Supreme Court in the 256 volumes of its Reports to interpret its meaning, the answer is that, as with the simple sayings of the great Galilean, whose words have likewise been the subject of unending commentary, the question is not one of clarity but of adaptation of the meaning to the ever-changing conditions of human life. Moreover, as with the sayings of the Master or the unequalled verse of Shakespeare, questions of construction are more due to the commentators than to the text itself.
On September 17 the convention met for the last time. The doc.u.ment was engrossed and laid before the members for signature. Of the fifty-five members who had attended, only thirty-nine remained. Of those, a number were unwilling to sign as individuals. While the members had not been unconscious of the magnitude of their labours, they were quite insensible of the magnitude of their achievement. Few there were of the convention who were enthusiastic about this result. Indeed, as the doc.u.ment was ready for signature, it became a grave question whether the remnant which remained had sufficient faith in their own work to subscribe their names, and if they failed to do so its adoption by the people would have been impossible. It was then that Doctor Franklin rendered one of the last and greatest services of his life. With ingratiating wit and with all the impressiveness that his distinguished career inspired, Franklin thus spoke:
”I confess that there are several parts of this Const.i.tution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them. For having lived long I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment and to pay more respect to the judgment of others. Most men indeed as well as most sects in religion think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them it is so far error. Steele, a Protestant, in a dedication tells the Pope that the only difference between our Churches in their opinions of the certainty of their doctrines is, the Church of Rome is infallible and the Church of England is never in the wrong. But though many private persons think almost as highly of their own infallibility as of that of their sect, few express it so naturally as a certain French lady, who in a dispute with her sister, said: 'I don't know how it happens, sister, but I meet with n.o.body but myself that's always in the right.'-Il n'y a que moi qui a toujours raison.
”In these sentiments, sir, I agree to this Const.i.tution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general government necessary for us, and there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people, if well administered, and I believe further that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other. I doubt, too, whether any other convention we can obtain may be able to make a better Const.i.tution. For when you a.s.semble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom you inevitably a.s.semble with those men all their prejudices, their pa.s.sions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an a.s.sembly can a perfect production be expected? It therefore astonishes me, sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does.... Thus, I consent, sir, to this Const.i.tution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure that it is not the best. The opinions I have had of its errors I sacrifice to the public good, I have never whispered a syllable of them abroad. Within these walls they were born and here they shall die. If every one of us in returning to our const.i.tuents were to report the objections he has had to it and endeavour to gain partisans in support of them, we might prevent its being generally received, and thereby lost all the salutary effects and great advantages resulting naturally in our favour among foreign nations as well as among ourselves from our real or apparent unanimity.
”On the whole, sir, I cannot help expressing a wish that every member of the convention who may still have objections to it, would with me, on this occasion doubt a little of his own infallibility-and to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument.”
Truly this spirit of Doctor Franklin could be profitably invoked in this day and generation, when nations are so intolerant of the ideas of other nations.
As the members, moved by Franklin's humorous and yet moving appeal, came forward to subscribe their names, Franklin drew the attention of some of the members to the fact that on the back of the President's chair was the half disk of a sun, and, with his love of metaphor, he said that painters had often found it difficult to distinguish in their art a rising from a setting sun. He then prophetically added:
”I have often and often in the course of the sessions and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears in its issues, looked at that behind the President without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting. But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun.”
Time has verified the genial doctor's prediction. The career of the new nation thus formed has. .h.i.therto been a rising and not a setting sun. He had in his sixty years of conspicuously useful citizens.h.i.+p-and perhaps no nation ever had a more untiring and unselfish servant-done more than any American to develop the American Commonwealth, but like Moses, he was destined to see the promised land only from afar, for the new Government had hardly been inaugurated, before Franklin died, as full of years as honours. Prophetic as was his vision, he could never have antic.i.p.ated the reality of to-day, for this nation, thus deliberately formed in the light of reason and without blood or pa.s.sion, is to-day, by common consent, one of the greatest and, I trust I may add, one of the n.o.blest republics of all time.
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