rule apportioning the number of representatives-"the number of representatives," the Constitution said, "shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand;" now, will not this be complied with, although the present number should never be increased? "When we come to the judiciary," he said, "we shall be more convinced that this Government will terminate in the annihilation of the State Government. The question then will be, whether a consolidated Government can preserve the freedom and secure the great rights of the people. If such amendments be introduced as shall exclude danger, I shall most gladly put my hand to this Constitution. When such amendments as shall secure the great essential rights of the people be agreed to by gentlemen, I shall most heartily make the greatest concessions, and concur in any reasonable measure to obtain the desirable end of conciliation and unanimity; but an indispensable amendment is that Congress shall not exercise the power of raising direct taxes till the States shall have refused to comply with the requisitions of Congress. On this condition it may be granted; but I see no reason to grant it unconditionally; as the States can raise the taxes with more ease, and lay them on the inhabitants with more propriety than it is possible for the general Government to do. If Congress hath this power without control, the taxes will be laid by those who have no fellow feeling or acquaintance with the people. This is my objection to the article under consideration. It is a very great and important one. I beg, gentlemen, seriously to consider it. Should this power be restrained, I shall withdraw my objections to this part of the Constitution; but, as it stands, it is an objection so strong in my mind that its amendment is with me a sine qua non of its adoption. I wish for such amendments, and such only, as are necessary to secure the dearest rights of the people."

Madison, who had kept himself in reserve to answer Mason, then took the floor. We must not confound the Madison who presided in the Federal Government, and who appeared in extreme old age in the Convention of 1829, with the Madison who now in his thirty-eighth year rose to address the House. Twelve. years before he had entered the Convention of 1776, a small, frail youth, who, though he had reached his twenty-fifth year, looked as if he had not attained his majority. Diffident as he was on that his first appearance in public life, his merits did not even

then pass unobserved; and he was placed on the grand committee of that body which reported the resolution instructing the delegates of Virginia in Congress to propose independence, and which reported the declaration of rights and the Constitution. After serving in the first House of Delegates to the close of its session, 16 he was soon after chosen a member of the Council, and was in due time transferred thence to Congress, when his talents were first exerted in debate, and of which body he was at that time a member. He had at an early day foreseen the necessity of an amendment of the Articles of Confederation; had been a member of the meeting at Annapolis; and was, perhaps, more instrumental in the call of the General Convention than any other of his distinguised contemporaries. In that body he had performed a leading part; and in addition to his ordinary duties as a member, he undertook the task of reporting the substance of the debates, and thus preserved for posterity the only full record of its deliberations that we possess. His services in

106 As Mr. Madison was a member of the May Convention of 1776, and also a member of the first House of Delegates, it is reasonable to suppose that he had been elected on two distinct occasions by the people; but as such was not the fact, and as both Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Madison have made statements in some measure derogatory from the true nature of our early Convention, it may be worth while to say that, after the subsidence of the House of Burgesses in the Revolution, the members who were returned by the people on the basis of that House, acted on the sovereign capacity of conventions, as we now understand the word The conventions, like the House of Burgesses, were elected for a given term; and the members of the Convention of May. 1776, after framing the Constitution, having been elected to serve one year, did not adjourn sine die, but being on the identical basis of the House of Delegates under the new Constitution, held over, and became the first House of Delegates of the General Assembly, the Senate of which had been elected by the people. Hence, Mr. Madison and Mr. Jefferson have frequently affirmed that the first Constitution of Virginia was made by an ordinary legislature; overlooking the facts stated above, and failing to recognize the two remarkable precedents afforded by English history in the Convention Parliament of 1660, which restored Charles the Second, and the Convention Parliament of 1688, which settled the British crown on William and Mary; both of which bodies, when their conventional duties were finished, became the ordinary House of Commons until the expiration of the term for which the members had been elected.

this respect were invaluable. 107 From his entrance into Congress he was compelled to engage in public speaking; and as all his intellectual powers had for years been trained to discussion, when he took his seat in the present Convention he was probably one of the most thorough debaters of that age. His figure had during the last twelve years become more manly, and though below the middle stature, was muscular and well-proportioned. His manners and address were sensibly improved by the refined society in which he had appeared during that interval, and his complexion, formerly pale, had become ruddy. He was a bachelor, and was handsomely arrayed in blue and buff. His coat was single-breasted, with a straight collar doubled, such as the Methodists wore thirty years ago; and at the wrist and on his breast he wore ruffles. His hair, which was combed low on his forehead to conceal a baldness which appeared in early life, was dressed with powder, and ended in a long queue, the arrangement of which was the chief trouble of the toilet of our fathers. The moustache, then seen only on some foreign lip, was held in abhorrence, and served to recall the carnage of Blackbeard, who had been slain in the early part of the century, in the waters of Carolina, by the gallant Maynard, and whose name made the burden of the song with which Mason and Wythe had been scared to sleep in their cradles. Even the modest whisker was rarely worn by eminent public men; and neither the moustache

107 Mr. Madison told Governor Edward Coles that the labor of writing out the debates, added to the confinement to which his attendance in Convention subjected him, almost killed him; but that having undertaken the task, he was determined to accomplish it. It is not improbable that other members made memoranda; but as yet we have nothing more than a very respectable record from Chief Justice Robert Yates, of New York, who, however, withdrew at an early period of the session. I attempted to sketch the debates in the Convention of 1829, and have saved a few things which occurred in the legislative committee; but gave the matter up when I saw the full and accurate reports made under the auspices of Mr. Ritchie. My slight experience convinced me that the task would be incompatible with any participation in society. It enhances our opinion of the talents of Madison, when we reflect that in addition to his formidable labor in reporting and writing out the proceedings of the Convention, he was able to bear a principal part in its deliberations.

nor the whisker was ever seen on the face of Madison, Monroe, Jefferson or Washington. He walked with a bouncing step, which he adopted with a view of adding to his height, or had unconsciously caught during his residence at the North, and which was apparent to any one who saw him, forty years later, enter the parlor at Montpellier. But what was far more important than any mere physical quality, he not only possessed, as before observed, the faculty of debate in such a degree that he may be said to exhaust every subject which he discussed and to leave nothing for his successors to say, but a self-possession, acquired partly by conflict with able men, partly by the consciousness of his strength, without which, in the body in which he was now to act, the finest powers would have been of little avail, and a critical knowledge of the rules of deliberative assem

He was fortunate in another particular of hardly less importance than the possession of great powers; he had an intimate knowledge of the men to whom he was opposed, and whose eloquence and authority would be apt to silence an opponent when felt for the first time. He had known Grayson in Congress, and had heard Henry in the Convention of 1776, and had encountered him in the House of Delegates on several grave questions that arose during the Revolution and subsequently. With Mason also he had served the same apprenticeship, and had recently acted with him in the General Convention; and he knew as well as any man living wherein the secret of the strength of these formidable opponents lay. But with all these advantages of knowledge and experience, of which he availed himself during the session to the greatest extent and with consummate tact, he had the physical qualities of an orator in a less degree than any of his great contemporaries. His low stature made it difficult for him to be seen from all parts of the house; his voice was rarely loud enough to be heard throughout the hall; and this want of size and weakness of voice were the more apparent from the contrast with the appearance of Henry, and Innes, and Randolph, who were large men, and whose clarion notes were no contemptible sources of their power. He always rose to speak as if with a view of expressing some thought that had casually occurred to him, with his hat in his hand, and with his notes in his hat; and the warmest excitement of debate was visible in him

only by a more or less rapid and forward see-saw motion of his body.108 Yet such was the force of his genius that one of his warmest opponents in the Convention declared, years after the adjournment, that he listened with more delight to his clear and cunning argumentation than to the eloquent and startling appeals of Henry; and he established a reputation in this body which was diffused throughout the State, and which was the groundwork of his subsequent popularity. One quality which was perceptible in all the great occasions of his life, occurring on the floor or in the cabinet, and which can never be commended too highly, was the courtesy and the respect with which he regarded the motives and treated the arguments of the humblest as well as the ablest of his opponents, and which placed him on a noble vantage ground when he was personally assailed by others." He viewed an argument in debate, not in respect of the worth or want of worth of him who urged it, but in respect of

109

108 I have often heard of Mr. Madison's mode of speaking from members of the Assembly of 1799. One of those members, some years ago, wrote a capital sketch of his manner, which appeared in the Richmond Enquirer. I am sorry that I have mislaid the reference to it. When the Euquirer was first published it always contained an index at the close of the year, and that index was a great help to the memory. The style of Mr. Madison's speaking was well adapted to the old Congress and the General Convention, which were small bodies; but he never could have been heard at any time in the hall of the House of Delegates. In the Convention of 1829 he spoke once or twice, but he was inaudible by the members who crowded about him. On one occasion I remember John Randolph rising and advancing several steps to hear him, and holding his hand to his ear for a minute or two, and then dropping his hand with a look of despair.

109 The sternest judge, before the merits of Madison as a speaker, could pass in review-one who was the Ajax Telamon of the opposite party-was the late Chief-Justice Marshall; yet, towards the close of his life, being asked which of the various public speakers he had heard-and he had heard all the great orators, parliamentary and forensic, of America-he considered the most eloquent, replied: "Eloquence has been defined to be the art of persuasion. If it includes persuasion by convincing, Mr. Madison was the most eloquent man I ever heard." Rives' Madison, II, 612, note. As an instance of the courtesy of Mr. Madison, while conversing on a very irritating theme with the late Lord Jeffery, who visited the United States in 1813, see Lord Cockburn's Life of Jeffery, I, 179.