the United States, and forwarded it to the Continental Congress, accompanying the instrument with the request that the proposed plan of government might be submitted to conventions of the people in the various states, for their discussion and ratification or rejection. The result of this recommendation was almost to turn the country at large into a vast debating society, and for nine months public speakers, pamphleteers, and newspapers declaimed and argued. Probably in no other time or country have the principles of government ever been so universally and elaborately discussed.
Even before the convention had made the result of its labors public, it was notorious that a large and powerful party in the state of New York was prepared to oppose whatever that body should submit. In the instructions of that state to her delegates to the federal convention, an attempt had been made to insert a restriction that any alterations made in the articles of confederation "should be not repugnant to, or inconsistent with, the constitution of this state,"[1] a motion lost by but one vote, and the instructions actually adopted only modified this limitation to the extent that the New York delegates were restricted to "the sole and express purpose of revising the articles of confederation."[2] When therefore the convention, discarding the old government, set about the framing of a new one, two of New York's three delegates, Robert Yates and John Lansing, Jr., withdrew from the convention on the grounds that the body had wholly exceeded its power, and united in an open letter of protest to the Governor of the state, George Clinton;[3] and though the third, Alexander Hamilton, refused to be bound by their action, and eventually signed the constitution, his act unquestionably transcended his powers.
Lines were therefore already drawn, when on September 27, 1787, the constitution was published in the New
