m up with
absolute conclusiveness:

The cases I have mentioned are the only acts of the "thirty-nine," or of
any of them, upon the direct issue, which I have been able to discover.

To enumerate the persons who thus acted as being four in 1784, two in
1787, seventeen in 1789, three in 1798, two in 7804, and two in
1819-1820, there would be thirty of them. But this would be counting
John Langdon, Roger Sherman, William Few, Rufus King, and George Read
each twice, and Abraham Baldwin three times. The true number of those of
the "thirty-nine" whom I have shown to have acted upon the question
which, by the text, they understood better than we, is twenty-three,
leaving sixteen not shown to have acted upon it in any way.

Here, then, we have twenty-three out of our thirty-nine fathers "who
framed the government under which we live," who have, upon their
official responsibility and their corporal oaths, acted upon the very
question which the text affirms they "understood just as well, and even
better, than we do now"; and twenty-one of them--a clear majority of the
whole "thirty-nine"--so acting upon it as to make them guilty of gross
political impropriety and willful perjury if, in their understanding,
any proper division between local and Federal authority, or anything in
the Constitution they had made themselves, and sworn to support, forbade
the Federal Government to control as to slavery in the Federal
territories. Thus the twenty-one acted; and, as actions speak louder
than words, so actions under such responsibility speak still louder.

When you come to evidence about a large and complex state of affairs,
which is the kind of fact that so many of the arguments of practical
life deal with, though you will still be dealing with a fact, yet the
very nature of the fact changes the value and the character of your
evidence. It is a comparatively simple matter to determine whether a
certain woman faced forward or backward as she was getting off a street
car, or whether the eggs of a sea urchin do or do not begin to germinate
under the influence of a certain chemical substance; but it is far from
simple to determine whether a free elective course has or has not inured
to greater intelligence and cultivation in the graduates of a certain
college, or whether the graduates of another college where the classical
course is maintained have keener and more flexible minds and more
refined tastes as a result of their study of the cla