WISHINGTON would not have found it easy to describe the duties of the
office he had accepted. While presiding over the Constitutional Conven-
tion at Philadelphia he had listened with his usual care to many long
debates on the subject; but the debaters themselves were uncertain. The
wisest of them admitted that the nature of the new government would be
largely determined by the men who took part in it and by the spirit of
the country. In this they were more right than they suspected; for even
when they thought they knew exactly what type of government they were
building, time was often to prove that they were building the opposite. ^*

They thought they were creating a government which would save the
country from further excesses of democracy; they were really creating a
government which would transform itself, with hardly a change in the
written constitution, into a democracy more thorough than anything they
foresaw in their gloomiest visions. They thought they were creating a
government which would save the country from faction and from polit-
ical parties; they were really creating a government which would soon
prove that it could not perform its duties without the hell) of political
parties. They thought they were creating a government which adapted
to the uses of a republic the main features of the British Constitution; they
were really creating a government which made forever impossible the
constitutional development at that moment taking place in England.

The mood in which the constitution-makers assembled at Philadelphia
is described in the fifteenth number of The Federalist. ^** Discussing the
state of the Union under the Articles of Confederation, Hamilton wrote:

We may indeed with propriety be said to have reached almost the
last stage of national humiliation. There is scarcely anything that can
wound the pride or degrade the character of an independent nation
which we do not experience. Are there engagements to the performance
of which we are held by every tie respectable among men? These are

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