I request that they may be considered in confidence, until the members of Congress are fully possessed of their contents, and shall have had opportunity to deliberate on the consequences of their publication; after which time, I submit them to your wisdom.

I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading.

Were I to define the British constitution, therefore, I should say, it is a limited monarchy, or a mixture of the three forms of government commonly known in the schools, reserving as much of the monarchical splendor, the aristocratical independency, and the democratical freedom, as are necessary that each of these powers may have a control, both in legislation and execution, over the other two, for the preservation of the subject's liberty.

We electors have an important constitutional power placed in our hands; we have a check upon two branches of the legislature.

Ambition is one of the ungovernable passions of the human heart. The love of power is insatiable and uncontrollable.

A single assembly is apt to grow ambitious, and after a time will not hesitate to vote itself perpetual. This was one fault of the Long Parliament; but more remarkably of Holland, whose assembly first voted themselves from annual to septennial, then for life, and after a course of years, that all vacancies happening by death or otherwise, should be filled by themselves, without any application to constituents at all.

That the said Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press or the rights of conscience.