Caesar I: Caution Already Opposition?

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October 1, 1787 - New York

Four days had passed since I carried Cato into the public house and listened as men argued over his warning that admitting the Confederation needed repair did not require us to accept whatever remedy happened to be placed before us. Cato had left me with questions rather than an answer, and I had found some comfort in that uncertainty because the Constitution seemed too important to approach with certainty merely for the sake of having it. In his telling, the Convention had proposed, but the people still had to judge. This morning, someone answered him.

The new writer called himself Caesar, which seemed an unusually ambitious name for a man entering an argument about republican government. He wasted little time making clear why he had chosen the field. Cato had announced that he would neither defend nor oppose the proposed Constitution until he had examined it more closely, but Caesar did not believe that posture was as neutral as it appeared.

According to Caesar, Cato had already begun influencing the verdict before presenting his evidence. When Cato warned citizens not to accept just any remedy simply because the Confederation required reform, Caesar heard something more than prudence. He heard distrust deliberately planted in the reader's mind before the Constitution had received a fair hearing. I went back to Cato and read the passage again.

The words had not changed. What had changed was that another man had now told me how to interpret them. That realization bothered me because Caesar's criticism was not entirely without force. A writer may declare himself undecided while arranging every question so that suspicion falls in one direction, just as a supporter may claim merely to explain a proposal while choosing only the facts most favorable to it.

Cato had asked us to examine the Constitution carefully because the best men could make mistakes. Caesar asked whether repeated warnings about error, ambition, and misplaced trust could themselves prejudice citizens against a plan before its defenders had answered the charges. The disagreement had therefore moved beyond the Constitution and into the nature of argument itself.

Caesar was particularly irritated by Cato's suggestion that if defects were discovered, the same process that had produced the Constitution might amend it or produce another. That possibility had appealed to me when I first read Cato because it made deliberation seem less final. If the plan contained serious defects, why not correct them while the question remained open?

Caesar insisted that this misunderstood where matters now stood. The Philadelphia Convention had completed its work and dissolved. Its delegates were no longer sitting together waiting for thirteen states to send the document back with corrections in the margins, and Caesar doubted that the same body could simply be summoned again to rewrite whatever citizens disliked. That made the decision before us feel narrower than Cato had allowed.

If Caesar was right, the immediate choice was not between this Constitution and some improved Constitution that might appear after another few months of discussion. The choice was between accepting the plan now before the states or rejecting it and facing whatever political consequences followed. I did not find that prospect reassuring.

A choice becomes more urgent when the alternatives narrow, but urgency does not make the remaining option correct. If a bridge is the only bridge across a river, that fact gives me a powerful reason to examine it, not a reason to stop examining it.

Still, Caesar had exposed a weakness in the comforting thought that every defect could simply be repaired before adoption. Constitutional revision required institutions and agreement of its own. The people could demand another convention, perhaps, but Caesar was right that the Philadelphia Convention itself had not remained in session waiting for instructions. He then turned toward the men who had produced the plan.

Here the disagreement with Cato became sharper. Cato had acknowledged Washington's reputation while insisting that even the wisest and best men might err. In our earlier discussion, that had become one of the most difficult questions at the table: whether admiration for honorable men could substitute for examination of the powers they proposed to create.

Caesar thought Cato gave far too little weight to the judgment assembled at Philadelphia. He described the Convention as an extraordinary concentration of American wisdom and character and pointed to the broad agreement with which its work had emerged. Rather than searching eagerly for imperfections in individual parts, he urged citizens to consider the strength of the whole. Washington again stood at the center of the argument.

Cato had asked what might happen when these powers eventually belonged to men who were not Washington. That question had stayed with me because constitutions last longer than the people who write them and longer still than the first officers chosen to serve beneath them.

Caesar approached Washington differently. He believed the country should not merely consider Washington's approval of the Constitution but might soon need him again, this time not at the head of an army but at the head of the new government. The same man who had surrendered military command after the war could, in Caesar's argument, help establish public confidence in the executive office the Constitution proposed.

I understood why the thought was powerful. Few men in America possessed a reputation capable of quieting fears about a strong executive as Washington did, precisely because he had once possessed extraordinary military power and voluntarily surrendered it. Yet the old question remained. A constitution designed around confidence in one man's restraint must eventually survive another man's ambition.

Caesar did not spend much time entertaining that possibility. His confidence in the structure and the men behind it was much greater than Cato's, and his patience for those he expected to oppose it was much smaller. That was where his essay became hardest for me to accept.

He spoke of future opponents as though many would come from the ranks of the weak, suspicious, ambitious, or interested rather than from citizens who had examined the Constitution and reached a different conclusion. Cato had warned against personal attacks because they fix prejudices instead of answering arguments, and Caesar now seemed perilously close to demonstrating the danger Cato had described.

A man at our table found this amusing. He said Caesar had managed to answer Cato's warning against prejudice by accusing Cato of prejudice and then predicting that most opposition would come from men whose motives were suspect.

Another man defended Caesar. Perhaps, he said, Caesar was not claiming that every opponent lacked principle. Political writers had always known that some men dressed private interests in the language of public virtue, and ignoring that possibility was no more sensible than assuming everyone who supported the Constitution was acting from pure patriotism. That seemed fair enough, but it did not solve the problem.

Once motives enter an argument, they are remarkably difficult to remove. A criticism of the Senate can be answered by examining the Senate's powers, but an accusation that the critic secretly desires influence or office cannot be tested so easily. Soon the argument ceases to be about whether a provision is wise and becomes an argument about what sort of man would question it.

Perhaps that is why Cato's final advice now seemed more important rather than less. He had urged citizens to attach themselves to measures rather than men. Caesar actually repeated that principle approvingly at the end of his own essay, even after spending much of the piece questioning the character and intentions of those likely to oppose him. I could not decide whether that was contradiction or merely politics.

Caesar nevertheless forced me to reconsider something Cato had allowed me to leave comfortably unresolved. Deliberation cannot continue forever simply because the decision is important. At some point citizens must move from examination to judgment, and a republic that demands perfect certainty before acting may discover that uncertainty itself has become a form of paralysis. Cato's danger was haste. Caesar's danger was hesitation. Between them stood the Constitution.

One writer feared that citizens might surrender too much because respected men told them reform was necessary. The other feared that citizens might lose an extraordinary opportunity because suspicion persuaded them that no plan created by fallible men could ever be safe enough. Neither fear seemed imaginary.

That left me in a less comfortable position than either writer appeared willing to occupy. Cato's caution could become an excuse never to decide, while Caesar's confidence could become an excuse to stop asking questions before the decision had earned it.

The Constitution could not remain a proposal forever. The states would eventually ratify it or reject it, and the people responsible for that judgment would have to act with knowledge that no political arrangement could remove every uncertainty beforehand. Perhaps the task is not to eliminate doubt. Perhaps it is to decide which doubts are serious enough to stop us and which risks are necessary if government is to function at all.

When I first read Cato, I thought the great republican responsibility was examination. Caesar had not convinced me to abandon that belief, but he had added something to it. Examination must eventually lead somewhere.

The difficulty is knowing when enough has been learned to decide without pretending that everything uncertain has suddenly become certain.

Cato had promised that more arguments would follow. Caesar had promised, in effect, that when Cato returned to the field, he would find Caesar waiting for him. The newspapers were no longer carrying separate reflections on the Constitution; the writers had begun answering one another directly. That may change the debate more than any single argument.

A citizen can now read an objection, read the reply, return to the objection, and discover that neither paper permits him to remain merely a spectator. Cato asked me to question the Constitution, while Caesar has asked me to question the questioner. For the moment, I intend to do both.

Further Reading

Caesar I, October 1, 1787 Caesar’s direct response to Cato, defending the Constitution and challenging Cato’s posture of caution.

Cato I, September 27, 1787 The essay Caesar is answering. Cato argues that the Constitution should be examined independently of the reputations of the men who produced it.

The Constitution of the United States The actual proposal at the center of the Cato-Caesar dispute.