ll their petty quarrels and
disagreements. It was the very essence of home rule. In vigorous
English Ambrose Spencer, William W. Van Ness, and Jacob R. Van
Rensselaer supported the Senator, while Ogden Edwards of New York
City, an able representative of Tammany, burning with a sense of
injustice, violently assailed the proposed plan. "The unanimous vote
of this convention," he said, "had shown that the Council of
Appointment was an evil. A unanimous sentence of condemnation has been
passed upon it, and I had not expected so soon to find a proposition
for its revival."

Probably no stranger scene was ever witnessed in a parliamentary body
than Erastus Root and Samuel Young, two radical legislators, advocates
of universal suffrage, and just now especially conspicuous because of
their successful support of the election of sheriffs and county
clerks, arguing with zeal and ability for the appointment of justices
of the peace. It seemed like a travesty, since there was not an
argument in favour of electing sheriffs that did not apply with added
force to the election of justices. The convention stood aghast at such
effrontery. It is impossible to read, without regret, of the voluntary
stultification of these orators, pleading piteously for the
appointment of justices of the peace while declaiming with passionate
righteousness against the appointment of sheriffs. With acidulated
satire, Van Ness, enrapturing his hearers by his brilliancy, held them
up to public ridicule if not to public detestation. But Van Buren's
bungling proposition, though once rejected by a vote of fifty-nine to
fifty-six, was in the end substantially adopted, and it remained a
part of the amended constitution until the people, very soon satisfied
of its iniquity, ripped it out of the organic law with the same
unanimity that their representatives now abolished the Councils of
Appointment and of Revision. Could Van Buren have had his way, the
Council of Appointment would have been changed only in name.

The work of the convention concluded, a motion for the passage of the
Constitution as a whole developed only eight votes in the negative,
though twenty-four members, including the eight delegates from Albany
and Columbia Counties, four from Montgomery, Jonas Platt of Oneida,
and Peter A. Jay of Westchester, because it extended and cheapened
suffrage, refused to sign it. Other objections were urged. Ezekiel
Bacon of Utica, explaining his affirmative vote, t