class should exist, and among those who really believed that it had the secret design of establishing an aristocracy if not actually a monarchy.  Washington held that its original avowed purpose, to keep the officers who had served in the Revolution together, would perpetuate the patriotic spirit which enabled them to win, and might be a source of strength in case of further ordeals.  But when he found that public sentiment ran so strongly against the Cincinnati, he withdrew as its president and he told Madison that he would vote to have the Society disbanded if it were not that it counted a minority of foreign members.  Stronger than a desire for a private life and for the ease of Mount Vernon was his sense of duty as a patriot; so that when this was strongly urged upon him he gave way and consented.

Spring came, the snows melted in the Northern States, and through the month of April the delegates to this Convention started from their homes in the North and in the South for Philadelphia.  The first regular session was held on May 25th, although some of the delegates did not arrive until several weeks later.  They sat in Independence Hall in the same room where, eleven years before, the Declaration of Independence had been adopted and signed.  Of the members in the new Convention, George Washington was easily the first.  His commanding figure, tall and straight and in no wise impaired by eight years’ campaigns and hardships, was almost the first to attract the attention of any one who looked upon that assembly.  He was fifty-five years old.  Next in reputation was the patriarch, Benjamin Franklin, twenty-seven years his senior, shrewd, wise, poised, tart, good-natured; whose prestige was thought to be sufficient to make him a worthy presiding officer when Washington was not present.  James Madison of Virginia was among the young men of the Convention, being only thirty-six years old, and yet almost at the top of them all in constitutional learning.  More precocious still was Alexander Hamilton of New York, who was only thirty, one of the most remarkable examples of a statesman who developed very early and whom Death cut off before he showed any signs of a decline.  One figure we miss—­that of Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, tall and wiry and red-curled, who was absent in Paris as Minister to France.

Massachusetts sent four representatives, important but not preeminent—­Elbridge Gerry, Nathaniel Gorham, Rufus King, and Caleb Strong.  New York had only two besides Hamilton; Robert Yates and John Lansing.  Pennsylvania trusted most to Benjamin Franklin, but she sent the financier of the Revolution, Robert Morris, and Gouverneur Morris; and with them went Thomas Mifflin, George Clymer, Thomas Fitzsimmons, Jared Ingersoll, James Wilson—­all conspicuous public men at the time, although their fame is bedraggled or quite faded now.  Wilson ranked as the first lawyer of the group.  Of the five from little Delaware sturdy John Dickinson, a man who thought, was no negligible quantity.