You separate, very properly, the sober, rational, and substantial part of their description from the rest.  You give, as you ought to do, weight only to the former.  What I have always thought of the matter is this,—­that the most poor, illiterate, and uninformed creatures upon earth are judges of a practical oppression.  It is a matter of feeling; and as such persons generally have felt most of it, and are not of an over-lively sensibility, they are the best judges of it.  But for the real cause, or the appropriate remedy, they ought never to be called into council about the one or the other.  They ought to be totally shut out:  because their reason is weak; because, when once roused, their passions are ungoverned; because they want information; because the smallness of the property which individually they possess renders them less attentive to the consequence of the measures they adopt in affairs of moment.  When I find a great cry amongst the people who speculate little, I think myself called seriously to examine into it, and to separate the real cause from the ill effects of the passion it may excite, and the bad use which artful men may make of an irritation of the popular mind.  Here we must be aided by persons of a contrary character; we must not listen to the desperate or the furious:  but it is therefore necessary for us to distinguish who are the really indigent and the really intemperate.  As to the persons who desire this part in the Constitution, I have no reason to imagine that they are men who have nothing to lose and much to look for in public confusion.  The popular meeting from which apprehensions have been entertained has assembled.  I have accidentally had conversation with two friends of mine who know something of the gentleman who was put into the chair upon that occasion:  one of them has had money transactions with him; the other, from curiosity, has been to see his concerns:  they both tell me he is a man of some property:  but you must be the best judge of this, who by your office are likely to know his transactions.  Many of the others are certainly persons of fortune; and all, or most, fathers of families, men in respectable ways of life, and some of them far from contemptible, either for their information, or for the abilities which they have shown in the discussion of their interests.  What such men think it for their advantage to acquire ought not, prima facie, to be considered as rash or heady or incompatible with the public safety or welfare.

I admit, that men of the best fortunes and reputations, and of the best talents and education too, may by accident show themselves furious and intemperate in their desires.  This is a great misfortune, when it happens; for the first presumptions are undoubtedly in their favor.  We have two standards of judging, in this case, of the sanity and sobriety of any proceedings,—­of unequal certainty, indeed, but neither of them to be neglected:  the first is by the value of the object sought; the next is by the means through which it is pursued.