Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 19.pdf/166

 JAMES WILSON - NATION BUILDER been tentatively agreed upon, a committee of five "on detail " was elected by ballot to draft the Constitution, and Wilson was chosen on this committee, and by some he is reputed to have been its chairman. Among the most treasured possessions of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania is a draft for the Constitution in Wilson's hand writing. It is not practicable in the limits of this sketch to follow Wilson through the varying phases and the shifting scenes of the Con stitutional Convention, and we can better and in more condensed form catch a glimpse of his theories of government by quoting, even if but briefly, his own words as expressed after the Consitituton was a completed whole. Fortunately, Wilson's principal speeches in the Pennsylvania Convention, called to consider the question of ratifying the Constitution, were recorded stenographically, and are accessible in Elliot's Debates, and Stone and McMaster's invaluable work, Pennsylvania and the Federal Constitution. These speeches by Wilson, and one by Chief Justice Thomas McKean, who was also a delegate to the ratifying convention, were considered of such intrinsic value that they were published in London in 1792, in a book of one hundred and fifty pages, all but fifteen being devoted to Wilson's arguments, sub nomine "com mentaries ON THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, in which are unfolded the principles 0} free government and the superior advantages 0} republicanism demonstrated." Wilson's views are luminous — more luminous, it is not too much to say, than those of any man who has written or spoken since his day; and it is not strange that it is so, for he was at the fountain source of our nation, and had a broader, deeper, and more comprehensive grasp of the principles upon which our governmental institutions are founded than any of his compatriots. For not even Madison, Rufus King, Hamilton or Randolph were possessed of as profound a knowledge of theories and conditions as

was Wilson — none of them had been trained in such institutions as St. Andrews, Glasgow, and Edinburgh, or had had such master minds as had Wilson to direct their educations; and none had had more practical experience in the affairs of government than this marvelous man, then at forty-five, in the full vigor of his prime. It was from the "Commentaries" that that discriminating constitutional historian, James Bryce, the present British Ambassador to America, gained his insight into Wilson's theories of government, causing him, in his great masterpiece, The American Common wealth, to declare Wilson to be "in the front rank of the political thinkers of his age" and "one of the luminaries of the time to whom subsequent generations of Americans have failed to do full justice." Bryce, however, does not stand alone among historians in paying high tribute to Wilson; Bancroft, Hildreth, Fisk, Cooley, McLaugh lin, Hart and a host of others all proclaim his greatness. Former President of the American Bar Association, Simeon E. Bald win, now President of the American His torical Association, says of him: "He was the real founder of what is dis tinctive in our American jurisprudence, and his arguments for the reasonableness and practicability of international arbitration were a century ahead of his time." John Marshall Harlan, Senior Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, declares that Wilson's "labors in the cause of justice and constitutional liberty were not surpassed in value to the country by those of anyone who served the public during the same period of our history." The late United States Judge, Henry W. Blodgett, stated that he "had it direct from Stephen A. Douglass that the statutes of the First Congress were written by Judge Wilson, and that they were so clear that no contest had ever arisen on account of any ambiguity of their language." Judson Harmon, Attorney General of the United States in Grover Cleveland's Cabinet, asserts that "no man of his time better