f opinion that a single Assembly was every
way adequate to the management of their federal concerns, and when the
Senate was invented, Franklin strongly objected. "As to the two
chambers," he wrote, "I am of your opinion that one alone would be
better; but, my dear friend, nothing in human affairs and schemes is
perfect, and perhaps this is the case of our opinions."

Alexander Hamilton was the ablest as well as the most conservative of
the American statesmen. He longed for monarchy, and he desired to
establish a national government and to annihilate state rights. The
American spirit, as it penetrated France, cannot well be described
better than it was by him: "I consider civil liberty, in a genuine,
unadulterated sense, as the greatest of terrestrial blessings. I am
convinced that the whole human race is entitled to it, and that it can
be wrested from no part of them without the blackest and most
aggravated guilt. The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged
for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a
sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the
Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power."

But when we speak in the gross of the American Revolution we combine
different and discordant things. From the first agitation in 1761 to
the Declaration of Independence, and then to the end of the war in
1782, the Americans were aggressive, violent in their language, fond
of abstractions, prolific of doctrines universally applicable and
universally destructive. It is the ideas of those earlier days that
roused the attention of France, and were imported by Lafayette,
Noailles, Lameth, and the leaders of the future revolution who had
beheld the lowering of the British flag at Yorktown. The America of
their experience was the America of James Otis, of Jefferson, of _The
Rights of Man_.

A change followed in 1787, when the Convention drew up the
Constitution. It was a period of construction, and every effort was
made, every scheme was invented, to curb the inevitable democracy. The
members of that assembly were, on the whole, eminently cautious and
sensible men. They were not men of extraordinary parts, and the genius
of Hamilton failed absolutely to impress them. Some of their most
memorable contrivances proceeded from no design, but were merely half
measures and mutual concessions. Seward has pointed out this
distinction between the revolutionary epoch