It is, therefore, certain that Washington said nothing in the convention except on the occasion of the Gorham amendment, and Mr. Bancroft rightly assigns the Morris quotation to some time during the week which elapsed between the date fixed for the assembling of the convention and that on which a quorum of States was obtained.  The words given by Morris, if uttered at all, must have been spoken informally in the way of conversation before there was any convention, strictly speaking, and of course before Washington was chosen president.  Mr. Fiske, who devotes a page to these sentences from the eulogy, describes Washington as rising from his president’s chair and addressing the convention with great solemnity.  There is no authority whatever to show that he rose from the chair to address the other delegates, and, if he used the words quoted by Morris, he was certainly not president of the convention when he did so.  The latter blunder, however, is Morris’s own, and in making it he contradicts himself.  These are his words:  “He is their president.  It is a question previous to their first meeting what course shall be pursued.”  In other words, he was their president before they had met and chosen a president.  This is a fair illustration of the loose and rhetorical character of the passage in which Washington’s admonition is quoted.  The entire paragraph, with its mixture of tenses arising from the use of the historical present which Morris’s classical fancies led him to employ, is, in fact, purely rhetorical, and has only the authority due to performances of that character.  It seems to me impossible, therefore, to fairly suppose that the words quoted by Morris were anything more than his own presentation of a sentiment which he, no doubt, heard Washington urge frequently and forcibly.  Even in this limited acceptation his account is both interesting and valuable, as indicating Washington’s opinion and the tone he took with his fellow-members; but this, I think, is the utmost weight that can be attached to it.  I have discussed the point thus minutely because two authorities so distinguished as Mr. Bancroft and Mr. Fiske have laid so much stress on the words given by Morris, and have seemed to me to accord to them a greater weight and a higher authenticity than the facts warrant.  Morris’s eulogy on Washington was delivered in New York, and may be found most readily in a little volume entitled Washingtoniana (p. 110), published at Lancaster in 1802.]

When a quorum was finally obtained, Washington was unanimously chosen to preside over the convention; and there he sat during the sessions of four months, silent, patient, except on a single occasion,[1] taking no part in debate, but guiding the business, and using all his powers with steady persistence to compass the great end.  The debates of that remarkable body have been preserved in outline in the full and careful notes of Madison.  Its history has been elaborately written, and the arguments and opinions