expressing a wish that every member of the convention who may still have objections to it, would with me, on this occasion doubt a little of his own infallibility—­and to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument.”

Truly this spirit of Doctor Franklin could be profitably invoked in this day and generation, when nations are so intolerant of the ideas of other nations.

As the members, moved by Franklin’s humorous and yet moving appeal, came forward to subscribe their names, Franklin drew the attention of some of the members to the fact that on the back of the President’s chair was the half disk of a sun, and, with his love of metaphor, he said that painters had often found it difficult to distinguish in their art a rising from a setting sun.  He then prophetically added: 

“I have often and often in the course of the sessions and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears in its issues, looked at that behind the President without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting.  But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun.”

Time has verified the genial doctor’s prediction.  The career of the new nation thus formed has hitherto been a rising and not a setting sun.  He had in his sixty years of conspicuously useful citizenship—­and perhaps no nation ever had a more untiring and unselfish servant—­done more than any American to develop the American Commonwealth, but like Moses, he was destined to see the promised land only from afar, for the new Government had hardly been inaugurated, before Franklin died, as full of years as honours.  Prophetic as was his vision, he could never have anticipated the reality of to-day, for this nation, thus deliberately formed in the light of reason and without blood or passion, is to-day, by common consent, one of the greatest and, I trust I may add, one of the noblest republics of all time.

III.  The Political Philosophy of the Constitution

In my last address I left Doctor Franklin predicting to the discouraged remnant of the constitutional convention that the nation then formed would be a “rising sun” in the constellation of the nations.  The sun, however, was destined to rise through a bank of dark and murky clouds, for the Constitution could not take effect until it was ratified by nine of the thirteen States; and when it was submitted to the people, who selected State conventions for the purpose of ratifying or rejecting the proposed plan of government, a bitter controversy at once ensued between two political parties, then in process of formation, one called the Constitution ratified without controversy.  In the remaining ten the struggle was long and arduous, and nearly a year passed before the requisite nine States gave their assent.  Two of the States refused to become parts of the new nation, even after it began, and three years passed before the thirteen States were re-united under the Constitution.