use in the Constitution which enacts,
that "This Constitution and the laws of the United States Which shall be
made in pursuance thereof, and all treaties made or which shall be made,
under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the
land, and the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in
the Constitution or the law of any State to the contrary notwithstanding."
You voted that an appeal should lay to the Supreme Judiciary of the United
States, for the correction of all errors, both in law and fact. You also
agreed to the clause that declares nine States to be sufficient to put the
government in motion.(45) These are among the greater positive virtues you
exhibited in the Convention; but it would be doing you injustice were I to
omit those of a negative nature. Since the publication of the
Constitution, every topic of vulgar declamation has been employed to
persuade the people, that it will destroy the trial by jury, and is
defective for being without a bill of rights. You, sir, had more candour
in the Convention than we can allow to those declaimers out of it; there
you never signified by any motion or expression whatever, that it stood in
need of a bill of rights, or in any wise endangered the trial by jury. In
these respects the Constitution met your entire approbation; for had you
believed it defective in these essentials, you ought to have mentioned it
in Convention, or had you thought it wanted further guards, it was your
indispensable duty to have proposed them. I hope to hear that the same
candour that influenced you on this occasion, has induced you to obviate
any improper impressions such publications may have excited in your
constituents, when you had the honor to appear before the General
Assembly.(46) From such high instances of your approbation (for every
member, like you, had made objections to parts of the Constitution) the
Convention were led to conclude that you would have honored it with your
signature, had you not been called to Maryland upon some indispensable
business; nor ought it to be withheld from you, that your colleagues
informed many Gentlemen of the House, that you told them you intended to
return before its completion. Durst I proceed beyond these facts, to which
the whole Convention can witness, I would ask you why you changed your
opinion of the Constitution after leaving Philadelphia. I have it from
good authority that you complained to an intimate ac