power, the object which should employ the attention and judgment of this convention is, whether the present arrangement is well calculated to promote and secure the tranquillity and happiness of our common country."

The answer was conclusive against everything but an illusion. If there be now a body corporate, a people of the United States, it cannot of course make a compact with itself. Whether there is such a body corporate, is a question of fact. There are three documents, and only three, which are proof one way or the other. The Declaration of Independence avers that independent states will thenceforth exist, not that a people of the United States will exist. The Articles of Confederation aver that thirteen named independent and sovereign states have formed a federal union, not a people. Subsequent to that union Great Britain acknowledged the independence not of a people nor of the United States, but of each state separately; which must have been recognized as the proper formulas by the representatives of the United States. Whether in any other part of the world governments have or have not been founded in contract is immaterial. Here they have been, unless consent is not contract. This is one of the self-evident propositions of the Declaration of Independence, to us at least a political truth, if we claim that our governments are "just." Both the form and the time of the contracts are known; therefore, there is no mystery in the matter of government, state or federal. When men form a community and institute a government, by our theory, they agree upon. duties and rights. When they agree that a community of which they are members shall join in a federal union, and that a federal government shall have authority over them, they agree upon rights and duties as members of their community, not of any other; and that community as their representative agrees with similar representatives. If this state and New York are in a federal union, the mutual duties and rights of the people of the two states exist from and are bounded by consent, whether the word people expresses individuals in an organization, or an organism. Why a government by contract should preclude the means of improvement, more than its alternative a government by force, is not perceptible. Contract can supply a method of amendment, and amendment can alter the method.

Wilson did not communicate the information that he had pressed upon the federal convention, a people of the United States, as a basis of its deliberation, and that the response, "Such is not the fact," had disposed of the assumption. The duty of a delegate and the honor of a man may not have compelled him to disclose the basis of the plan in the federal convention, but they certainly forbade the assertion that bargains were not made in it by the states represented. Wilson agrees with Hobbes and

Sir Robert Filmer that a government ought to be absolute and irresponsible, but differed as to the depositary; which they placed in a monarch, and he in a majority. At that date prevalent opinion held consent the basis of a just government; a state, the organization of a people; and a federal union of states with a limited federal government, the best system for the states. To his averment that except upon the assumption of a people of the United States we shall never become a nation, the response, “We do not wish to become a nation," admitted of no rejoinder. He accepted the action of that prevalent opinion under protest uttered in the congress of the United States, in the debate upon the articles of confederation, in the federal convention, and in the convention of Pennsylvania. His perspicacity had discerned the danger point in the system (every system has its danger point), that suffrage might not keep to the constitutional limits.* Believing that it would not, he preferred that it should be absolute through a constitution, to its becoming absolute through usurpation. True it is that no system can exclude the consequences of human nature. In a government by consent, as in every other, no matter how equitable and explicit the partition of power, some will strive for more than an allotted portion, and some will resent the attempt. "Each legislature (federal and state)," said Wolcott in the Connecticut convention, "has its province. Their limits may be distinguished. If they will run foul of each other, if they will be trying which has the hardest head, it cannot be helped. The road is broad enough; but if two men will jostle each other, the fault is not in the road." The men of that period knew that questions might arise which they had not foreseen, and for which the Constitution had not provided, to the solution of which, neither a law nor a judge subsisting, they must trust to the good sense of posterity, but they were not willing to buy the exclusion of such possibilities at the price which Wilson proposed.

Free from the task of defending an hypothesis, Wilson invited attention to various provisions of the Constitution; elucidating them with marked ability, and finding just praise for all except that one which by its novelty and effect had seemed to foreigners a supreme excellence, and to the federal convention a supreme necessity-the process for amendment. The reason for an omission so significant was probably because

*Ca qu'il y a de commun dans les différents intérêts forme le lieu social: et s'il n'y avait pas quelque point dans lequel tous les intérêts s'accordent, nulle société ne saurait exister. Or, C'est uniquement sur cet intérêt commun, que la société doit être gouvernée. Contrat Social.

Nous montrerons comment les républiques Américaines ont réalisé cette idée alors presque nouvelle en théorie, de la nécessité d'établir, et de régler par la loi, un mode régulier et paisible pour réformer les constitutions elles-mêmes, et de séparer ce pouvoir, de celui de faire les lois. Esquisse des progrés de l'ésprit humain.

that process acknowledged consent; recognized the equity of an approach to unanimity, for a change in what had been established by unanimity; gave a state power for amendment, upon the principle of power in representation; and for suffrage drew the line between use and usurpation. McKean closed the debate. He reminded the convention that Pennsylvania only authorized it to accept or to reject; therefore, that the duty of judgment was to weigh the advantages and disadvantages, and to decide as either preponderated.

He then proceeded to state seriatim, examine, and answer such objections as had been formulated, concluding with: "A student of law all my life, this system appears to me the best that the world has yet seen. I care not what it is called-a consolidation, a confederation, or a national government-the name is immaterial: the thing unites the states and makes them like one in particular instances and for particular purposes, which is what is most ardently desired by most of the sensible men in this country." Denial of “a people of the United States," and the distinction between identity and resembiance, could not have been conveyed with greater delicacy or greater plainness.

After the Constitution had been accepted, the opponents of ratification, by the amendments they desired, proved, as so did the opponents in every convention, that opposition had not been to the plan, but to the absence of language needed in their view to make the plan unmistakably what the advocates of ratification said it was meant to be and was. The reasoning attributed to the opponents of Wilson's hypothesis is imaginary. Such it must have been in substance, but undoubtedly expressed with far greater command of language.

IRWIN, VIRGINIA.

A. W. blason

AN HOUR WITH GEORGE BANCROFT

It was a rainy, blowy, dismal day in Washington, toward the close of October, 1889, when having exhausted the morning papers and the desultory chit-chat in the reading-room of the Hotel Normandie it occurred to me to call on the venerable historian, whom I had known upward of twenty odd years, but whom I had not seen for a long period owing to his change of residence from New York to Washington. I had another motive in calling upon him, which was to solicit, should I find him in a genial mood, some scrap of historical writing which might possibly lie among his unpublished papers, as a final contribution from his pen to this magazine, in which I knew he felt great interest, and to which he had frequently contributed in recent years.

Bancroft's residence was within an easy walk of the hotel-a spacious and pleasantly situated edifice on a broad street and in a quiet neighborhood, which externally and internally seemed admirably adapted to the requirements of a literary man who, at the advanced age of eighty-ninewhile still actively engaged in his dearly beloved pursuit of historical research and book-writing-mingled far less than formerly in that social life which for years seemed to have been to him a necessity of existence. When the time comes to publish his biography the writer thereof will render scanty justice to his subject if he fails to give large space to the social qualities, the remarkable personal peculiarities, and, it must be added, the curious mélange of little vanities and frivolities, which went to make up one of the most original characters among the American notabilities of the present century.

George Bancroft presented the severest contrasts that individual idiosyncrasy offers among literary men of the highest culture. Stern and inflexible in his records and speech when analyzing the events of the past and the character of the men who figured in them; serious and emphatic as if his historic pages were to be accepted without criticism as the ipse dixit of unquestioned authority from which 'no appeal was possible, the historian when he left his library to go into the world seemed to assume a new nature with his change of costume, and to enter the social circle with the playfulness of a school-boy released from the drudgery of study. It would be difficult to draw the line where natural pleasantry ended and the artificial began. "From grave to gay, from serious to severe," he passed

so rapidly, that those who met Mr. Bancroft for the first time at some social assembly and had an opportunity of observing him could not well make out what sort of a character stood before them, or whether a sage of history, a profound philosopher, or a social punchinello was the most fitting term to apply to him.

I have myself in former years met Mr. Bancroft under varied circumstances when it was as difficult to decide which was his chief characteristic, as in the well-known story of the chameleon to ascertain the precise color of that changeable and interchangeable reptile. At a dinner-party he was the most versatile of the company, now grave and unctuous in deciding a vexed question in history, now exciting general laughter by a joke not quite in harmony with the conventional proprieties of the table; while on the same evening, when descending the staircase with, as he supposed, no one but his companion within listening distance, I have heard him give vent to expressions akin to that of an actor behind the scenes who was disconcerted with the part his companion, a lady, had played. That he himself was more or less an "actor" in society was too generally acknowledged to be ignored in recalling his characteristics even in a superficial sketch of this kind. I remember an evening at the Century Club in New York when at a festive gathering a certain young lady had been crowned by the members as the "May Queen" of the occasion. I was standing near by when Mr. Bancroft entered the gay assembly, and, striking an attitude of astonishment before the first young lady whom he encountered, exclaimed: "Why are you not Queen of the May? You should have been the May Queen "-with other pleasantries which called up a blush of gratified vanity at such a compliment from such a man. This was all very well so far as it went, but when later on the distinguished historian addressed the same words to another young lady with whom I stood conversing, accompanied by the same gesticulations expressive of surprise and devotion, the speech fell rather tamely upon my ears. If insincerity is the basis of flattery, Mr. Bancroft was an adept in such pleasing deceptions; and not only when bandying les phrases de société, but in the lecture-room he laid himself open to the charge of—to use a courteous term-embellishment. I was once in company with Mr. Anthony Trollope, the English novelist, at a meeting of the New Jersey Historical Society, when the paper of the evening was read by Mr. Bancroft. My companion, who was noted for keen critical observation as well as for inimitable cleverness in depicting character, paid close attention to the lecturer and his discourse, without making a single comment until, at the burst of applause at one of the speaker's happy "points," Trollope turned and