sitive virtues" which the Landholder has so
obligingly attributed to me in Convention, and which he was so desirous of
conferring upon me as to consider the guilt of misrepresentation and
falsehood but a trifling sacrifice for that purpose, and to increase my
mortification, you will find I am equally compelled to yield up every
pretence even to those of a negative nature, which a regard to justice
has, as he says, obliged him not to omit. These consist, as he tells us,
in giving my entire approbation to the system as to those parts which are
said to endanger a trial by jury, and as to its want of a bill of rights,
and in having too much candour there to signify that I thought it
deficient in either of these respects. But how, I pray, can the Landholder
be certain that I deserve this encomium? Is it not possible, as I so
frequently exhausted the politeness of the Convention, that some of those
marks of fatigue and disgust, with which he intimates I was mortified as
oft as I attempted to speak, might at that time have taken place, and have
been of such a nature as to attract his attention; or, perhaps, as the
Convention was prepared to slumber whenever I rose, the Landholder, among
others, might have sunk into sleep, and at that very moment might have
been feasting his imagination with the completion of his ambitious views,
and dreams of future greatness. But supposing I never did declare in
Convention that I thought the system defective in those essential points,
will it amount to a positive proof that I approved the system in those
respects, or that I culpably neglected an indispensable duty? Is it not
possible, whatever might have been my insolence and assurance when I first
took my seat, and however fond I might be at that time of obtruding my
sentiments, that the many rebuffs with which I met, the repeated
mortifications I experienced, the marks of fatigue and disgust with which
my eyes were sure to be assailed wherever I turned them--one gaping here,
another yawning there, a third slumbering in this place, and a fourth
snoring in that--might so effectually have put to flight all my original
arrogance, that, as we are apt to run into extremes, having at length
become convinced of my comparative nothingness, in so august an assembly
and one in which the science of government was so perfectly understood, I
might sink into such a state of modesty and diffidence as not to be able
to muster up resolution enough to break the