Page:Debates in the Several State Conventions, v5.djvu/596

570 one of the capital articles of the system. Col. Lee proposes, that the President should choose a council of eleven, and, with their advice, have the appointment of all officers. Col. Mason's proposition is, that a council of six should be appointed by the Congress. What degree of power he would confide to it, I do not know. The idea of the governor is, that there should be a plurality of coequal heads, distinguished probably by other peculiarities in the organization. It is pretty certain that some others, who make a common cause with them in the general attempt to bring about alterations, differ still more from them than they do from each other; and that they themselves differ as much on some other great points as on the constitution of the executive.

You did not judge amiss of Mr. Jay. The paragraph affirming a change in his opinion of the plan of the Convention, was an arrant forgery. He has contradicted it in a letter to Mr. J. Vaughan, which has been printed in the Philadelphia gazettes. Tricks of this sort are not uncommon with the enemies of the new Constitution. Col. Mason's objections were, as I am told, published in Boston, mutilated of that which pointed at the regulation of commerce. Dr. Franklin's concluding speech, which you will meet with in one of the papers herewith enclosed, is both mutilated and adulterated, so as to change both the form and spirit of it.

The Philadelphia papers will have informed you of the result of the convention of that state. New Jersey is now in convention, and has probably by this time adopted the Constitution. Gen. Irvine, of the Pennsylvania delegation, who is just arrived here, and who conversed with some of the members at Trenton, tells me that great unanimity reigns in the convention.

Connecticut, it is pretty certain, will decide also in the affirmative by a large majority. So, it is presumed, will New Hampshire; though her convention will be a little later than could be wished. There are not enough of the returns in Massachusetts known for a final judgment of the probable event in that state. As far as the returns are known, they are extremely favorable; but as they are chiefly from the maritime parts of the state, they are a precarious index of the public sentiment. I have good reason to believe that if you are in correspondence with any gentleman in that quarter, and a proper occasion should offer for an explicit communication of your good wishes for the plan, so as barely to warrant an explicit assertion of the fact, that it would be attended with valuable effects. I barely drop the idea. The circumstances on which the propriety of it depends are best known to you, as they will be best judged of by yourself. The information from North Carolina gave me great pleasure. We have nothing from the states south of it.$271$

, January 10, 1788.

,—I received two days ago your favor of December 27, enclosing a copy of your letter to the Assembly. I have read it with attention, and I can add with pleasure, because the spirit of it does as much honor to your candor, as the general reasoning does to your abilities. Nor can I believe that in this quarter the opponents of the Constitution will find encouragement in it. You are already aware that your objections are not viewed in the same decisive light by me that they are by you, I must own that I differ still more from your opinion, that a prosecution of the experiment of a second Convention will be favorable, even in Virginia, to the object which I am sure you have at heart. It is to me apparent that, had your duty led you to throw your influence into the opposite scale, it would have given it a decided and unalterable preponderance; and that Mr. Henry would either have suppressed his enmity, or been baffled in the policy which it has dictated. It appears also that the grounds taken by the opponents in different quarters forbid any hope of concord among them. Nothing can be farther from your views than the principles of different sets of men who have carried on their opposition under the respectability of your name. In this state, the party adverse to the Constitution notoriously meditate either a dissolution of the Union, or protracting it by patching up the Articles of Confederation, In Connecticut and Massachusetts, the opposition proceeds from that part of the people who have a repugnance in general to good government, or to any substantial abridgment of state powers, and a part of whom, in