Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/375

Rh stoves. The passion of usefulness ruled him to the last.

He hoped to have rest for the remaining days of his life in his quiet home at Philadelphia among his books and friends. But he had scarcely arrived when he was made a member of the supreme executive council, and then president (or governor) of the State of Pennsylvania, an office he held for three consecutive years, elected unanimously each time except the first, when one vote was cast against him. But in the meantime he was also a member of the convention which framed the Constitution of the United States. The principles he professed and acted upon there were of the democratic kind. He did not believe in a strong and splendid government. He was opposed to every restriction of the suffrage. He would not consent to anything that would “depress the virtue and public spirit of our common people.” He was opposed to the requirement of a fourteen-years residence before admitting foreigners to citizenship. He would not consent to the absolute veto power of the president. He did favor the power of Congress to impeach public officers, the president included. When the convention found itself in an apparently hopeless tangle about the equal representation of the states, large and small, in Congress, and seemed on the point of breaking up, Franklin first proposed that every day's session should be opened with prayer, which, however, was not accepted, as one member said, because the convention had no money to pay the clergyman. And finally, Franklin, as a member of a special committee, to which that question was referred, suggested, as a compromise, the simple solution that every state should have an equal representation in the Senate, while in the lower house the people should be represented according to numbers, and that house should have the power to originate the revenue bills.