convention well proved that "Publius" had written in vain, for only one-third of the men chosen were Federalists—making the contest one of the most crushing defeats ever experienced by the Anti-Clinton party. Nor were the members of the convention when met, any more open to persuasion than the people had been. "I steal this moment," wrote one, "while the Convention is in Committee and the little Great Man employed in repeating over Parts of Publius" to write; and another, when an Anti-federalist was charged with having "compiled" his speech from the New York papers, replied that "if so, he had as much credit with me as Mr. Hamilton had, for retailing in Convention, Publius."
But if the masses were held to the democratic party in the state by the arguments of "Cato" and "Brutus" and were deaf to the reasoning of "Publius," there was a limit to what they could be made to accept. That the federal compact robbed them of power, and was a "gilded trap," leading to consolidation and to eventual tyranny, they had strong reasons for believing, but when the state machine, triumphant in shaping public opinion to this extent, went one point further, and advanced the idea of separation from the Union, which indeed was the logical outcome of a rejection of the constitution, it was not followed by the rank and file. In the history of the United States disunion has been often talked and sometimes attempted by political leaders, but not once have the masses accepted it. The only serious endeavor to break up the country which has ever occurred was in a section where those who should have been the controlling citizens were chiefly slaves, unable to make their influence a power; and even there, in the mountain regions, where the plain American resembled his more northern countryman, disunion never prospered. From 1774, if not earlier, the leaders have upheld or denounced a united country, according to their selfish or sectional views, but the unspeaking masses have felt, what it took statesmen years to learn, that there was but one people and one nation, be the states thirteen or thirty. In 1788 the
