rnment could be permanent in which the people were denied
a direct voice in the election of their representatives. Hamilton,
though in favor of making the first branch elective, proposed that the
Senate should be chosen by the people, and the executive by electors,
_chosen by electors_, who were to be chosen by the people in districts;
Senators and the President both to hold their offices during good
behavior. He was also, as were a few others, in favor of an absolute
executive veto on acts of the Legislature. He, however, signed the
Constitution, and urged others to do the same, as the only means of
preventing anarchy and confusion. While the proposed Constitution was in
every particular satisfactory to none, very few were disposed to
jeopardize the Union by the continuance of a system which _all_ admitted
to be inadequate to the objects of the Union. To the hope, therefore, of
finding the new plan an improvement on the old, and of amending its
defects if any should appear, is to be attributed the general sanction
which it received.

It is indeed remarkable that a plan of government, containing so many
provisions to which the most strenuous opposition was maintained to the
end, should have received the signatures of so large a majority of the
convention. Perhaps there never was another political body in which
views and interests more varied and opposite have been represented or a
greater diversity of opinion has prevailed. Nor is it less remarkable
that a system deemed so imperfect, not only by the mass of its framers,
but by a large portion of the eminent men who composed the State
conventions that ratified it, should have been found to answer so fully
the purpose of its formation as to require, during an experiment of more
than sixty years, no essential alteration; and that it should be
esteemed as a model form of republican government by the enlightened
friends of freedom in all countries.

Not a single provision of the Constitution, as it came from the hands of
the framers, except that which prescribed the mode of electing a
President and Vice-President, has received the slightest amendment. Of
the twelve articles styled "amendments," the first eleven are merely
additions; some of which were intended to satisfy the scruples of those
who objected to the Constitution as incomplete without a bill of rights,
supposing their common-law rights would be rendered more secure by an
express guarantee; others are explanatory