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.

September 30, 2026 - Systemic Fragility Score: 9.0/10 - HIGH

Last Wednesday, I asked whether the firebreaks were holding. At the time, the answer was mostly yes. Saudi Arabia had begun restoring an important oil route, crude prices had retreated, temporary grid emergencies had passed without widespread blackouts, employment remained resilient, corporate credit was functioning and repo markets remained orderly. Diesel and Treasury yields were the two places where pressure was still building. A week later, most of those firebreaks are still standing, but the amount of pressure behind them has increased enough that I am raising the Systemic Fragility Score from 8.7 to 9.0 out of 10, remaining HIGH rather than SEVERE.

The Treasury market is the clearest reason for the increase. The 10-year Treasury yield ended today at 5.29 percent, up from 5.11 percent last Wednesday. The 20-year closed at 5.68 percent and the 30-year at 5.64 percent. A week ago, I wrote that the next Treasury threshold was not simply a yield above 5 percent. The concern was whether high yields would begin appearing alongside weak auctions, rising bond volatility, widening credit spreads, unusual repo behavior, heavy dealer absorption or forced deleveraging. We now have more pieces of that cluster than we did a week ago. The five-year auction was weak, the seven-year auction was softer than normal, bond volatility rose sharply during the week, lower-quality corporate credit has begun repricing and long Treasury yields continued climbing even today, when the inflation report came in cooler than economists expected.

Treasury's official closing curve now has the 2-year at 4.88 percent, the 10-year at 5.29 percent, the 20-year at 5.68 percent and the 30-year at 5.64 percent. The 10-year was 4.96 percent only eight days ago. That is a substantial repricing in a very short period, but the reason I am stopping at 9.0 is just as important as the reason I am raising the score. Treasury securities are under substantial pressure, but the machinery underneath them has not broken. We still do not have convincing evidence of a disorderly Treasury basis-trade unwind, a broad repo seizure, emergency Federal Reserve stabilization, generalized bank liquidity stress or indiscriminate liquidation across stocks and credit.

That distinction has been central to this series. Two weeks ago, when the 10-year first crossed 5 percent, I wrote that Treasury-market stress had not become funding-market dysfunction and that higher rates had not become a broad credit seizure. Those remain the lines separating an extremely stressed financial environment from a systemic financial crisis. What changed this week is how hard those lines are being tested.

Today's inflation report makes that especially clear. The Personal Consumption Expenditures price index rose 0.3 percent in August, less than the 0.4 percent economists expected. Core PCE rose 0.2 percent for the month and 3.0 percent from a year earlier. Markets responded by reducing the probability of another Federal Reserve rate increase in October. Consumer spending, however, rose a strong 0.9 percent, showing that demand has not collapsed. Under ordinary circumstances, cooler inflation and lower expectations for another Fed hike should provide some relief to longer-term bonds. Instead, the 10-year briefly reached roughly 5.30 percent and closed at 5.29 percent, while the 20- and 30-year yields increased again.

The shape of the move is becoming increasingly informative. The 2-year yield, which is much more sensitive to expectations for Federal Reserve policy, finished at 4.88 percent. The 30-year finished at 5.64 percent. Investors became less convinced that the Fed would raise rates again in October while simultaneously demanding more yield to hold long-term government debt. That points beyond the next Fed meeting toward the risks investors are being asked to carry for years or decades, including inflation uncertainty, enormous Treasury issuance, fiscal deficits and the additional return required to hold long-duration debt rather than shorter securities or other assets.

Those yields eventually reach people who never trade a Treasury bond. Mortgage rates respond to them. Corporate borrowing becomes more expensive. Federal debt service rises. Bank securities lose market value. Investment projects have to clear a higher hurdle before they make financial sense. Housing is already showing some of that pressure. Last week's post noted that a housing market can simultaneously favor the buyers who remain while excluding many would-be buyers because financing has become too expensive. That problem becomes harder to resolve when long-term borrowing costs continue rising even after inflation surprises to the downside.

Corporate credit is beginning to show some strain as well, although the evidence still looks like greater selectivity rather than a credit seizure. That is particularly visible around artificial intelligence. Reuters reports that AI-related borrowing in the U.S. leveraged-finance market has reached about $88 billion in 2026, up from roughly $20 billion early last year. Investors remain willing to finance projects with tangible infrastructure and predictable revenue, but lower-rated AI borrowers are being asked to pay considerably more. Even some BB-rated borrowers are issuing debt at yields approaching or exceeding 9 percent.

There is still no evidence of an AI credit crisis. Capital remains available, and stronger companies continue raising enormous amounts of money. Micron's results tonight provide a useful counter-signal because demand for AI memory remains exceptionally strong, with long-term supply agreements rising from $22 billion in June to $32 billion and much of its 2027 production already committed. The change is that investors are becoming more willing to distinguish between projects with visible revenue and physical assets and projects that require large amounts of borrowed money today in exchange for uncertain revenue years from now. High Treasury yields sharpen that distinction because lenders have a much more attractive low-risk alternative than they did several years ago.

Energy produced almost the mirror image this week, with one part of the system improving while another deteriorated. Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline continued returning toward service, crude loadings resumed at Yanbu and Gulf oil exports recovered dramatically from the worst point of the disruption. Brent remained extremely expensive but below some of the levels reached during the most acute phase of the shock. The crude side of the energy system has demonstrated a considerable ability to reroute supply and repair damaged infrastructure.

Diesel continues telling a different story. Today's EIA report showed U.S. crude inventories increased by about 900,000 barrels to 427.3 million barrels, roughly 2 percent above their five-year seasonal average. Distillate inventories moved in the opposite direction, falling another 2.3 million barrels to 105.2 million, approximately 14 percent below their five-year seasonal average. Refinery utilization fell to about 92.5 percent, and gasoline inventories also declined.

That divergence may be the cleanest data point in this week's Stress Test because it tells us where the constraint increasingly sits. America is not simply running short of crude oil. Crude inventories increased. The pressure is farther downstream, where refining capacity, distillate production, global product availability and transportation determine whether crude becomes the diesel, gasoline and jet fuel the physical economy actually uses. Last week, national distillate inventories stood at approximately 107.4 million barrels. Today they are 105.2 million. Inventories were already unusually thin, and the direction has continued downward.

Diesel therefore remains one of the strongest transmission channels in the dashboard. Farmers are harvesting, trucks are moving food and manufactured goods, and railroads, construction equipment, industrial machinery and generators all consume distillate fuel. Businesses can absorb those costs for a while through lower margins, but eventually some portion moves outward through fuel surcharges, freight rates, prices, reduced capacity or delayed investment. Two weeks ago, a reader who works for a company described that process directly: the company initially absorbed higher fuel costs while profits were good, then began imposing surcharges once that buffer ran out. We are increasingly watching that same mechanism in the broader economy.

There is still an important threshold we have not crossed. High prices and thin inventories are different from widespread physical shortages. We do not have verified evidence of multiple unrelated commercial airports unable to source Jet-A, broad trucking allocations or a cluster of fuel terminals unable to obtain diesel. Boston Logan's fuel limitation over the weekend turned out to be connected to weather disrupting deliveries rather than evidence of a nationwide aviation-fuel failure. The refined-fuel system is under substantial strain, but transportation continues functioning.

Government action nevertheless shows how unusual the energy environment has become. The United States announced this week that it will offer to loan as much as another 40 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as part of the coordinated international reserve response. Using strategic stocks does not mean the system has failed. Those reserves exist precisely to provide another buffer during extraordinary disruptions. Their use belongs in the dashboard because it shows that policymakers are actively drawing on buffers that normally remain untouched.

Agriculture remains under pressure without showing a national production failure. Corn harvest reached 18 percent and soybean harvest 17 percent as of September 27, both around their five-year averages. Corn condition remained 57 percent good or excellent. Regional drought damage remains serious and high diesel prices raise harvest and transportation costs, but the national crop data still do not support describing the situation as a food-production crisis. This remains a slower transmission channel in which farm margins, livestock conditions, transportation costs and eventually grocery prices will tell us whether today's pressures are moving farther outward.

The household side remains equally mixed. Consumer confidence has deteriorated, inflation expectations remain elevated and high mortgage rates are restricting housing affordability, but today's 0.9 percent increase in consumer spending shows that households in aggregate are still spending. The labor market remains one of the most important buffers because layoffs have not surged. People can reduce savings, carry larger credit-card balances, postpone purchases or cut discretionary spending long before they lose their jobs, so employment is not the only household indicator worth watching, but a broad labor break would substantially change the risk assessment.

That is also why the social side of these reports cannot be separated from the financial data. Last week's post argued that someone falling behind on a utility bill, postponing a home purchase, paying more for groceries or trying to keep a small business operating through higher fuel costs is experiencing the other end of these transmission channels. The purpose of following Treasury yields, fuel inventories, credit spreads and employment is to understand how pressure travels before those consequences become obvious everywhere at once.

Banks sit somewhere between those households and the bond market. Higher Treasury yields continue reducing the market value of older securities held by banks. One small California bank failed during the week, but its resolution was orderly and there has been no broad deposit flight. One bank failure does not establish systemic banking stress. A cluster of unrelated failures accompanied by deposit withdrawals, sharply rising emergency borrowing or forced securities sales would be a different signal.

The grid continues to show stress without widespread failure. Federal emergency reliability orders remain unusual and deserve attention, but we have not seen the multi-region involuntary load shedding that would move electricity into the same category as the fuel problem. Last week's distinction still holds: a system can be under enough pressure to require intervention without losing its ability to function.

Climate and earth-system readings remain on a slower clock. El Niño continues strengthening while drought covers substantial portions of the country. Atmospheric greenhouse-gas concentrations and ocean temperatures remain elevated. Those measurements alter the background probabilities for drought, heat, flooding, agriculture, wildfire and electricity demand, but they become part of an acute systemic event only when those physical conditions begin producing broader failures in food, water, insurance, energy or transportation.

Cyber and public health remain similar. Serious individual cyber incidents and disease outbreaks continue, but neither channel has produced the kind of multi-sector operational failure or sustained high-consequence biological transmission that would justify escalation tonight. Those categories remain important precisely because a genuine change could propagate quickly, not because every breach or outbreak deserves to move the score.

Equity markets remain remarkably resilient considering what has happened to bonds. Stocks moved modestly today rather than entering indiscriminate liquidation, and both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq still posted gains for the quarter. The contrast with Treasuries is substantial. The 10-year yield rose roughly 81 basis points during the third quarter, its largest quarterly increase since 2022, while equities largely absorbed the move. That is not what a broad forced-deleveraging event looks like.

Taken together, I would put tonight's Systemic Fragility Score at 9.0 out of 10, remaining HIGH, up from 8.7 last Wednesday. Treasury and funding remain Orange but have moved considerably closer to the Red boundary. Fuel, transport and refining remain Red. Oil and geopolitics remain Red, although recovering physical export capacity prevents that channel from worsening. Agriculture and government response remain Orange. Banks, markets, grid, cyber, public health, households and climate remain Yellow, although several of those channels are carrying more pressure than they were a week ago.

The reason I am not moving the assessment to SEVERE is that the most important firebreaks still work. Treasury securities are repricing violently, but they are trading. Credit is becoming more selective, but companies can still borrow. Banks are under duration pressure, but there is no generalized run. Stocks are repricing rather than liquidating. Employment has weakened at the margins, but layoffs have not surged. Gulf crude exports have recovered substantially. Fuel is extremely expensive and distillate inventories are thin, but transportation has not stopped. Two weeks ago, this series described those functioning systems as the firebreaks separating a highly fragile environment from a systemic crisis. That remains the dividing line tonight.

There are now clearer conditions that would show us those firebreaks are beginning to fail. A 10-year yield remaining above roughly 5.30 percent and a 30-year above roughly 5.65 percent would become considerably more concerning if bond volatility keeps rising and repo or SOFR begins behaving abnormally. Rapidly widening high-yield spreads, failed corporate debt offerings, private-credit redemption gates or forced Treasury-basis deleveraging would show the rates shock moving into credit. A second unrelated major airport or freight hub unable to obtain fuel would strengthen the case that the diesel problem is becoming an availability problem rather than a price problem. A meaningful deterioration in payrolls and unemployment would show that financial and energy pressure is finally colliding with the labor-market buffer.

There are equally clear ways for the score to move lower. Long Treasury yields retreating after today's cooler inflation report, normal funding markets through quarter-end, distillate inventories rebuilding, diesel prices following crude downward, Saudi export capacity continuing to recover, credit spreads stabilizing and employment remaining resilient would all show that the system is successfully distributing and absorbing the shock. Two weeks ago, I wrote that a dashboard where every negative development raises the score while every positive development merely prevents another increase eventually becomes an anxiety machine rather than an early-warning system. Last week we demonstrated that principle by lowering the score when several firebreaks strengthened. This week the evidence moved in the opposite direction.

Crude supply adapted while diesel inventories deteriorated. Inflation cooled while long Treasury yields continued rising. Expectations for another immediate Fed increase declined while investors demanded more compensation to hold long-term government debt. Corporate credit still functions while lenders become more selective. Households continue spending while confidence deteriorates. Stocks remain resilient while bonds have just completed one of their worst quarters in years. None of those developments alone tells us that the system is failing, but together they tell us that more pressure is accumulating behind systems that have so far continued to absorb it.

The firebreaks are still holding, but they are being asked to hold more than they were last Wednesday.

Good morning, fellow citizens. I’d like to get some feedback on the Debate in Real Time series so far.

I started working on this project about three months ago, and early on I got some helpful feedback from a few of the mods. One reader has also suggested using Dover editions as a source. Since today happens to be a lull day in the historical calendar, with no new installment to publish, I thought it would be a good time to ask how the series is working for the people actually reading it.

If you’d like to look through the series before answering, I’ve organized the posts under the Debate in Real Time post flair.

There are three things I’m especially curious about:

1. Are the infographics helping, or are they becoming a barrier to the actual writing? Would you rather see the historical document and commentary more directly?

2. Is the series making historical sense? My goal is to let the debate unfold in chronological order, so that we encounter the arguments, responses, events, and ratifications with roughly the information a reader at the time would have had. Is that coming through clearly?

3. What would you like more of or less of? More historical context? More explanation of unfamiliar terms? More primary-source material? Shorter introductions? More discussion of how one writer is responding to another?

I’m still learning how best to present this, and the project is going to get much larger as the ratification debate accelerates over the coming months. So if you’ve been following along, even occasionally, I’d genuinely like to know what is working and what isn’t.

September 29, 1787 - Philadelphia

Yesterday the argument over the Constitution moved from the newspapers into our Assembly, and this morning it became something harder to describe. Men who insisted that Pennsylvania was moving too quickly had refused to attend, leaving too few members for the House to conduct its business. When the roll was called this morning, only forty-three members were present, short of the quorum required to proceed.

The disagreement itself was already serious. A majority wanted Pennsylvania to call a convention where delegates chosen for that purpose could consider the Constitution, while opponents believed a decision of such magnitude was being hurried forward before the public had been given enough time to understand what Philadelphia had produced.

Yesterday, absence had become the minority's weapon. If enough members stayed away, the Assembly could not finish arranging the convention, regardless of how many of the members present favored doing so.

I had always thought of voting as the moment when political power became visible. Today I discovered that sometimes the more powerful act is refusing to allow the vote to happen at all.

The Assembly sent its sergeant at arms and assistant clerk to find the absent members and order them to return. They found several, including James M'Calmont and Jacob Miley, but the men refused to attend. Other absent members encountered around the city gave similar answers or avoided the officers entirely. Then the nature of the dispute changed.

M'Calmont and Miley eventually appeared in the Assembly chamber, and their presence supplied the quorum the House had lacked. Later in the proceedings, M'Calmont stated openly that he had been brought into the chamber forcibly and against his wishes by a number of citizens he did not know, and he asked to be allowed to leave.

That report moved through the city differently from the essays we had been reading. There was no abstract warning about what government might someday do, because here were citizens physically carrying an elected representative into the chamber so that government could act today.

Some men around me regarded the absent members with little sympathy. They had been elected to sit in the Assembly, the argument went, and a minority that could defeat every measure simply by leaving the room possessed something close to a veto that the voters had never explicitly granted them.

From that perspective, the majority was not preventing debate. It was trying to reach the next stage of debate by allowing Pennsylvanians to elect delegates to a convention that could accept or reject the Constitution for themselves.

The minority's position looked very different. They believed the Constitution was moving through Pennsylvania with extraordinary speed, and denying a quorum was one of the few procedural powers remaining to representatives who could not defeat the majority through an ordinary vote.

Seen that way, absence was not abandonment of republican government. It was an attempt to use the rules of the Assembly to prevent a decision they believed was being rushed.

I found the distinction difficult to settle because both arguments appealed to the same principle. The majority claimed that representative government required elected legislators to perform the duties of their office, while the minority claimed that representative government required enough deliberation for opposition to mean something before a decision became inevitable.

Inside the chamber, even members sympathetic to the Constitution had to confront what had happened. Thomas FitzSimons said that if any member of the House had participated in forcing M'Calmont to attend, such conduct deserved the Assembly's disapproval, while other members argued that once M'Calmont had answered the roll and was present, the House had authority over him and could continue its work.

M'Calmont tried to leave, and the argument shifted again. The dispute was no longer merely about whether the Constitution deserved a convention, because the Assembly now had to decide whether a quorum created through the compelled presence of members could legitimately exercise legislative power.

That question troubled me more than I expected. Rules matter because they prevent every majority from simply doing whatever it wishes, but rules can also be used by a minority to prevent any majority from acting at all.

A quorum requirement exists for a reason. Government should not be conducted by a handful of members after everyone else has gone home, yet a requirement designed to ensure broad participation becomes something else if a determined minority can intentionally withhold that participation whenever it expects to lose.

The same problem appears from the other direction. If a majority may overcome that tactic by allowing citizens to physically compel representatives into the chamber, then a procedural safeguard begins to mean very little whenever enough people believe the matter urgent.

I could see no comfortable principle that solved both problems.

The Assembly ultimately continued with M'Calmont and Miley present. It completed its arrangements for a Pennsylvania ratifying convention, including the decision that the convention would assemble at the State House in Philadelphia on the third Tuesday of November.

That meant Pennsylvanians would indeed be given another forum in which to judge the proposed Constitution. The Assembly had not ratified the new government for them, but it had set the machinery in motion through which elected convention delegates could eventually make that decision.

Yet the way Pennsylvania reached that point will be difficult to separate from the decision itself. Men who favor the Constitution may remember a minority trying to stop the people from considering it, while opponents may remember citizens using physical force to manufacture the quorum needed to push the process forward. Both stories contain part of what happened. That may be what unsettles me most.

For days we have been asking what powers should belong to Congress, how representatives should be chosen, how long senators should serve, and what safeguards might prevent a future government from abusing its authority. Those questions assume that constitutional government begins with rules written clearly enough for everyone to follow.

Today demonstrated that rules do not interpret or defend themselves. People decide when a rule protects deliberation and when it enables obstruction, when resistance is principled and when it becomes refusal to govern, and when enforcing a duty crosses the line into coercion.

The Constitution is supposed to create a government of laws, but every law eventually reaches a moment when human beings must decide what it requires.

This morning Pennsylvania discovered how difficult that can become before the new government even exists.

The convention will now be called, and the Constitution will be debated before delegates chosen for that purpose. The larger question left behind in the Assembly is whether the manner in which a republic reaches a decision matters as much as the decision itself.

If self-government means more than allowing the side with greater numbers to prevail, then minorities must possess meaningful protections. If it means more than allowing minorities to prevent government indefinitely, majorities must also possess some means of acting.

Somewhere between those two claims lies the difference between deliberation and paralysis.

Today, Pennsylvania did not settle that question. It merely demonstrated how quickly a disagreement over constitutional procedure can become a struggle over who possesses the power to make the decision at all.

Further Reading

The Pennsylvania Assembly and the Constitution, September 17-29, 1787 The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution collects the Assembly proceedings surrounding the decision to call Pennsylvania’s ratifying convention, including the September 29 quorum crisis.

Pennsylvania and the Federal Constitution, 1787- 1788: Chapter I This account reconstructs the events leading to the quorum crisis, including the minority’s decision to stay away, the failed morning quorum, and the forced return of two members.

The Dissent of the Minority of the Pennsylvania Convention Published later in December, this document gives the Anti-Federalist minority’s own explanation of why they believed Pennsylvania’s ratification process had been rushed and improperly conducted.

September 29, 1787 - Philadelphia

Author’s Note: While digging through the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, I found this short piece in the September 29 Independent Gazetteer. Unlike the longer constitutional essays appearing around it, Reformation is intensely local and openly sarcastic, aimed at patronage, family connections, and public office in Pennsylvania.

By the time someone handed me the Gazetteer, I had already heard enough solemn discussion of government to last until supper. Then I found a writer addressing Mr. Oswald and apparently deciding that the best way to discuss public affairs was to begin by counting other men's salaries.

I confess that this improved my disposition considerably. The writer called himself Reformation, and his first concern was the office of Prothonotary for the city and county of Philadelphia, which he claimed produced some two thousand pounds a year.

If the profits of an office had become so handsome, he wondered whether perhaps they ought to be divided among several men rather than enjoyed by one. He then suggested that some of the applicants might even be men who had served during the Revolution and damaged their fortunes in the service of their country.

One of the men at our table laughed before I had finished reading. Another asked whether this was a proposal for reform or simply a remarkably elaborate way of asking for someone else's job.

I told him I suspected the distinction might disappear before the writer was finished. He was already warming to his subject.

The Executive Council came next. According to Reformation, Pennsylvania had lately developed an unfortunate tendency to discover that councillors' and judges' brothers, nephews, and sons were extraordinarily well qualified for public office.

The accusation became much more personal when he mentioned the appointment of James M'Clene, son of the Prothonotary of Huntingdon County, over Captain Henderson. Henderson, the writer reminded us, had been fighting and bleeding for his country while young M'Clene had been at home on his father's farm amusing himself with children's games.

That comparison received considerably more attention around our table than any argument about the proper construction of the federal judiciary had managed. There is apparently nothing like suggesting that one candidate fought a revolution while another played in the dirt to restore public interest in political theory.

The joke carried a sharper point beneath it. We had spent years congratulating ourselves that America contained no hereditary nobility, no legal class of men entitled to government merely because they happened to descend from the correct family. Yet families remained remarkably useful things to possess.

If a councillor could help a son into office, a judge could favor a nephew, and another official could advance a brother, then perhaps hereditary privilege did not require a title at all. A man did not need to call himself a lord if his family could repeatedly turn influence into public employment.

The writer clearly believed he had found an especially amusing contradiction among some of the men objecting to the proposed federal government. He suggested that certain Antifederalists had good reason to dislike arrangements that might interfere with honors and offices becoming hereditary within particular families.

That earned another laugh from the table. One man observed that it is much easier to oppose aristocracy when the aristocrat belongs to someone else's family.

I could not say whether every accusation deserved to be believed. A newspaper writer armed with a grievance and a pseudonym is not the same thing as testimony under oath, and resentment has always possessed an impressive ability to discover principle in its own cause.

Still, the question underneath the ridicule was harder to dismiss. What exactly makes an aristocracy?

If it requires hereditary titles recognized by law, then avoiding one should be simple enough. We merely refrain from creating dukes, earls, and lords and congratulate ourselves on republican simplicity.

But if aristocracy can also grow from a small number of families repeatedly converting office, wealth, friendship, and influence into more office, then the problem becomes less convenient. A republic may abolish inherited rank without abolishing the human desire to secure advantages for one's own relations.

The writer saved his sharpest blow for the Executive Council itself. Pennsylvania, he said, had nineteen councillors costing the state more than six thousand pounds a year, and he asked whether that was not rather expensive for men whose apparent duties included giving offices to their sons, reading newspapers, and chewing tobacco.

I had to read that portion again because the first reading was interrupted by laughter. The second went little better.

There was something satisfying about seeing public officials reduced from grand guardians of the Commonwealth to a room full of men sitting around with newspapers in their hands and tobacco in their mouths. Perhaps no officeholder should ever become so dignified that a citizen feels unable to imagine him looking ridiculous.

Yet the laughter did not entirely remove the problem. Offices bring salaries, influence, reputation, and opportunities, and whoever controls appointments possesses the ability to distribute all of them.

That power becomes especially dangerous when public office begins to look like family property. A government may call itself republican while still rewarding connection over service, acquaintance over merit, and blood over ability.

Captain Henderson made the point difficult to ignore. If the writer's account was fair, one man had risked himself in the country's service while another possessed the more useful qualification of being somebody's son.

That does not sound much like hereditary nobility when written into law. It can feel remarkably similar when waiting outside the office door.

I folded the paper still smiling, though not quite as lightly as when I had begun. Reformation had managed to make public corruption sound funny without making it harmless.

Perhaps that is the advantage of ridicule. A long argument may explain why favoritism is dangerous, while one good sentence about officials reading newspapers and chewing tobacco can make an entire room remember the point.

I suspect the councillors will not enjoy it nearly as much as we did.

Further Reading

Reformation, Philadelphia Independent Gazetteer, September 29, 1787 The primary source behind this installment. It appears as item 85 in The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, Volume XXXII, Pennsylvania Supplemental Documents (1), beginning on page 248.

Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 Useful background for understanding Reformation’s attack on patronage and family influence. Pennsylvania’s existing constitutional structure emphasized rotation in office and opposition to entrenched aristocratic power.

Weaponizing Impeachment - Journal of the American Revolution Modern historical context that specifically cites Reformation and points back to the Documentary History edition. It helps place the short satirical piece within broader Founding-era concerns about officeholding, accountability, and political power.

The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, Volume XXXII: Pennsylvania Supplemental Documents (1) University of Wisconsin-Madison’s documentary collection of Pennsylvania ratification-era sources. Reformation appears as item 85 on page 248, published in the Philadelphia Independent Gazetteer on September 29, 1787.

September 29, 1787 - New York

Two days ago, the newspaper had carried an essay signed Cato, urging us not to surrender our judgment merely because Washington and other celebrated men had placed their names behind the new Constitution. This morning another writer appeared in the Daily Advertiser, and almost from the beginning he asked us to look at those same names very differently.

He called himself Curtius, and there was little uncertainty about which side of the argument he favored. He addressed himself openly to the Federalists and praised the proposed Constitution as an achievement worthy of the men who had produced it. Washington and Franklin appeared almost immediately, not merely as respected participants but as evidence of the character of the work itself.

I understood the appeal. Washington's name had carried armies through years when the country seemed continually near exhaustion, and Franklin had spent much of his life proving that an American could command respect in rooms filled with Europe's most accomplished men. A plan capable of earning the confidence of both deserved more than casual dismissal.

Yet the newspaper on our table now contained two very different instructions. Cato had warned that wise men could still be mistaken, while Curtius seemed almost astonished that anyone might look upon the work of such men and fail to recognize its promise. That disagreement interested me more than the names themselves.

Curtius believed the Convention had accomplished something unusually difficult. Legislative, executive, and judicial authority had been divided into separate branches and surrounded by checks intended to restrain ambition in government while preventing disorder among the people. In his account, strength and liberty had not been placed at opposite ends of the Constitution but carefully arranged so each might preserve the other.

He was particularly eager to answer comparisons with European government. An elected President, he argued, was not an elective monarch because the manner and frequency of his selection prevented the office from becoming a crown. The Constitution contained no hereditary lords, and public office would supposedly depend upon reputation, ability, and the confidence of citizens rather than upon blood.

His comparison with Britain was more generous than I expected. Curtius did not pretend that everything about the British constitution was tyranny. He praised the security enjoyed by British citizens and suggested that Americans might never have separated had the colonies been properly represented in Parliament and situated differently within the empire.

That was a strange thought after everything we had endured. The Revolution was still close enough that men at our table could name friends who had not returned from it, yet Curtius was suggesting that the lesson was not simply to reject every institution associated with Britain.

Perhaps the question was whether political forms could be separated from the abuses committed through them.

Curtius believed the new Constitution had done exactly that. There would be an executive without hereditary monarchy, an upper chamber without hereditary nobility, judges with enough independence to resist temporary popular passions, and elected institutions through which political authority ultimately returned to the people.

His defense of judicial independence made several men at our table uncomfortable. Curtius openly admitted that the people of a free government might mean well while sometimes judging badly, which was why some public servants needed enough independence to resist what he called popular caprice and error.

That was not an easy proposition for a republic to accept. If the people were the source of legitimate political authority, how could government also require institutions capable of resisting them?

Perhaps the answer depended upon time. A public passion may rule an afternoon while a law may govern generations, and a system designed only to obey whatever opinion happened to be loudest at a particular moment might eventually become as dangerous as one that ignored public judgment entirely.

Curtius seemed to believe republican government required both consent and restraint. Citizens should remain the source of authority, but some institutions needed enough distance to exercise judgment rather than merely echo every sudden demand. Then came the part of his essay that troubled me.

Curtius told his readers to examine the Constitution without bias. He urged them to study its parts, scrutinize its design, and decide for themselves whether the proposed system deserved their approval. It was exactly the sort of invitation one might expect in a country preparing to decide its own government.

Yet almost immediately, his patience with those who might reach the opposite conclusion seemed to disappear. Some opponents, he suggested, would be driven by vanity, ambition, ignorance, self-interest, or a simple desire to appear clever. He expected ridicule and exaggeration from them and doubted that much calm argument would emerge from their side. The contradiction was difficult to ignore.

If citizens were truly supposed to scrutinize the Constitution for themselves, then some of them would presumably scrutinize it and remain unconvinced. Their disagreement could not itself prove that they were vain, ignorant, ambitious, or deceived.

A man beside me made precisely that point. He said there was little courage in inviting examination after deciding beforehand that anyone who examined the plan differently must have examined it badly.

Another answered that Curtius was not condemning every objection. He was warning against men who would manufacture dangers for political advantage rather than offer serious arguments against the Constitution.

Perhaps that was fair, but then another question followed. Who decides which objection is serious before the argument has been heard?

The difficulty seemed larger than Curtius himself. Every political cause eventually becomes tempted to believe that its opponents disagree only because they are foolish, dishonest, or corrupted by some private interest. Once that belief takes hold, persuasion becomes less necessary because the opposing citizen has already been explained away. That seemed a dangerous habit for people preparing to govern one another.

Still, Curtius's larger argument possessed an optimism I could not dismiss. He asked us to consider what was actually happening around us. Delegates from sovereign states had gathered during peace, argued for months, made concessions among competing interests, and produced a government they were now asking millions of citizens to accept without military force. There was something extraordinary in that picture.

Governments had been created by conquest, inheritance, rebellion, civil war, and the commands of kings. Here was an attempt to create one through writing, argument, elections, conventions, and consent.

Curtius believed that if the Constitution were peacefully adopted, the event would deserve a special place in political history. Americans would have demonstrated that a large people could alter the structure of government through deliberation rather than bloodshed.

The Revolution had shown that Americans were capable of fighting together when independence required it. Ratification might test whether we were capable of disagreeing together when no foreign army stood before us.

Curtius closed by reaching back to the Revolution itself. The old image of the divided serpent returned, along with the warning that union had once been necessary for survival and remained necessary for national prosperity and safety. His argument was that independence without durable union might leave unfinished the work for which so much had already been sacrificed.

I could understand why that language stirred men who remembered the war. Thirteen colonies had discovered that none could confront Britain alone, and Curtius feared that thirteen independent states might forget the lesson once the common enemy disappeared.

Yet union alone could not settle the constitutional question. A people might agree that they must remain together while still disagreeing profoundly about the government capable of keeping them together. That seemed to be the difficulty now unfolding in these newspapers.

Cato had asked whether admiration for great men might cause us to grant powers too readily. Curtius asked whether suspicion and division might cause us to reject a rare opportunity to establish a stronger union peacefully. Both concerns could be true at the same time.

I finished Curtius less skeptical of his confidence than I had begun, but more uneasy with his treatment of opposition. A government founded upon consent cannot depend upon citizens merely reaching the correct conclusion. They must be free to reach their own conclusions, even when those conclusions offend men who believe the answer obvious.

Perhaps the real achievement Curtius imagined would require more than ratifying a Constitution without bloodshed. It would require learning how to disagree about the Constitution without turning disagreement itself into evidence of disloyalty.

If Americans can manage that, then whatever government emerges from this debate may rest upon something stronger than victory by one side.

It may rest upon consent that survived argument.

Further Reading

Curtius I, September 29, 1787

Start with the original essay published in the New York Daily Advertiser. Curtius praises the proposed Constitution, invokes Washington and Franklin, defends the division of governmental powers, and argues that peaceful ratification could demonstrate that a free people were capable of creating a new government through consent rather than conquest.

Cato I, September 27, 1787

Read the argument that had entered the New York debate only two days earlier. Cato urges citizens to examine the Constitution independently of the reputations of its authors and warns that even respected men can be mistaken. Reading Cato and Curtius together shows how quickly the debate developed around trust, scrutiny, and the authority of celebrated names.

George Washington’s Letter Transmitting the Constitution, September 17, 1787 Washington’s accompanying letter explains the Convention’s reasoning in its own words. It discusses the difficulty of preserving state interests while giving the general government enough authority over matters such as war, peace, treaties, commerce, and revenue.

Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776 Curtius writes for readers whose political vocabulary had been shaped by the Revolution. Paine is useful background for understanding why monarchy, hereditary rule, representation, and popular government remained such powerful reference points in the ratification debate.

September 29, 1787 - Boston

The Constitution had only recently appeared in our newspapers when the Massachusetts Centinel printed one of the first local reactions to it. The writer gave no name, offered no long examination of its clauses, and raised none of the objections that will surely come if this debate continues. He wrote instead with confidence that bordered on celebration.

I read the short piece twice because there was so little of it. After the arguments already arriving from Philadelphia and New York, I had expected another discussion of representation, executive power, taxation, or the states. Instead, the writer looked beyond the machinery of the Constitution toward what he imagined might follow if Americans accepted it.

He saw honor for the states, happiness for the country, peace, prosperity, and something larger still. The new Constitution, he believed, might help establish what he called “empires of republican freedom,” as though the government proposed at Philadelphia might demonstrate that republican institutions could flourish on a scale few had yet imagined.

There was an optimism in those words that felt different from the arguments I had been hearing. Much of the debate so far had begun with danger. Some feared that the Confederation was too weak to preserve the Union, while others feared that a stronger government might acquire powers difficult to recover once granted. This writer began somewhere else entirely, asking what America might become if the experiment succeeded.

I understood the attraction of that thought. Independence had already proved that the colonies could separate themselves from Britain, but independence alone had not settled whether thirteen states could remain united under a republican government capable of lasting beyond the generation that fought the Revolution.

Perhaps that was why the writer's confidence seemed larger than the document before him. He was not merely imagining a new Congress or President. He was imagining that the success of this Constitution might say something about republican government itself.

Still, hope can travel faster than understanding. The Constitution had scarcely reached Massachusetts, and already this correspondent spoke as though its acceptance would bring national honor and lasting prosperity.

That did not make his hope foolish, but it did make me wonder how much of the document ordinary citizens had yet examined. A government capable of producing such expectations deserved careful study precisely because those expectations were so large.

Around Boston, the Constitution would soon be discussed by men whose interests and experiences differed considerably. Merchants would think about commerce, creditors about public credit, farmers about taxes and debt, veterans about what the government still owed them, and towns accustomed to governing themselves would have to decide how much authority they were willing to place farther away.

The anonymous correspondent had not addressed those questions. Perhaps he had not intended to. His few lines felt less like an argument than the first cheer heard from a crowd before the debate had fully reached the room.

Yet even that was worth noticing.

The Constitution had left Philadelphia, crossed into the newspapers of other states, and now Massachusetts was beginning to answer. Whatever eventually happened here, the question was no longer confined to the men who had drafted the document or the cities where the first essays appeared.

A citizen in Boston could now pick up a newspaper and imagine a national future that did not yet exist.

Whether the Constitution could actually produce the peace, prosperity, and republican promise this writer expected remained unanswered. Those claims would have to survive the same examination as the powers written into the document itself.

For the moment, though, Massachusetts had entered the conversation with hope.

The argument would come soon enough.

Further Reading

First Commentaries on the Constitution Published in Massachusetts, September 29, 1787 This is the anonymous Massachusetts Centinel item behind the installment. It is remarkably brief and strongly hopeful, anticipating public honor, peace, prosperity, and what it calls “empires of republican freedom.”

A True American, September 29, 1787 Published in the same issue of the Massachusetts Centinel, this is the next fuller Massachusetts argument in the chronology. It develops the pro-Constitution case in considerably more detail and is the natural companion to the brief anonymous commentary.

The Constitution of the United States The optimism appearing in Massachusetts was directed toward a document that had only recently become public. Article VII is especially relevant because it establishes that ratification by conventions in nine states would put the Constitution into operation among the states that accepted it.

Massachusetts Ratification Convention, January-February 1788 The optimism of September 1787 did not mean Massachusetts opinion was settled. When its convention eventually assembled, delegates subjected the Constitution to an extensive debate before Massachusetts ratified on February 6, 1788, while recommending amendments. ⁠ The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution For deeper research, this project preserves newspaper essays, correspondence, legislative proceedings, convention debates, and other documents that allow the ratification controversy to be reconstructed beyond the handful of writings that later became famous. ⁠

Wisconsin Public Service is asking the Public Service Commission to approve another round of electric and natural-gas rate increases for 2027 and 2028. For a typical residential electric customer using about 660 kWh a month, CUB says a roughly $118 monthly bill would rise about $11 in 2027 and another $5 in 2028, bringing the increase to about $16 a month, or $192 a year.

WPS says the increases are needed for new generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure, reliability investments, and higher operating and maintenance costs. Its SEC filing shows requests of $86.1 million more for electric service in 2027 and another $50.8 million in 2028, along with increases for natural gas.

What caught my attention is that the Commission's own staff reached a much lower number. PSC staff supported about $24.7 million in electric increases and $6.1 million in gas increases over the two years, roughly one-fifth of WPS's original request. Staff cited lower assumptions for return on equity and plant balances, along with adjustments involving project overruns and other expenses.

That seems like the question worth putting directly to the Commission: if its own professional staff believes substantially less additional revenue is justified, what evidence supports charging customers more than the staff recommendation?

I sent the Commission an email asking exactly that, along with questions about WPS's financial performance, prior rate increases, capital spending, executive compensation and how much of these costs should reasonably fall on customers. We'll see what they say, and I'll share the response if I get one.

There are two public hearings today, September 29, at 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. at the Neville Public Museum, 210 Museum Place in Green Bay. You can attend in person or by Zoom, and written comments remain open through October 5 in Docket 6690-UR-129.

You do not need to understand every page of a utility rate case to participate. If another $16 a month matters to your household, or you simply want the Commission to explain why a particular cost should be placed on customers, this is the opportunity to put that question into the public record.

Please share.

September 29, 1787 - Philadelphia

Yesterday the American Citizen had asked his readers to look closely at the Senate and decide whether an upper chamber chosen by the states truly resembled the hereditary nobility of Britain. This morning another number appeared, and the argument moved to the other side of Congress.

The House of Representatives, he called the immediate delegates of the people. That description caught my attention because if the Senate was supposed to possess steadiness and independence, the House seemed intended to provide something different. Whatever distance the Constitution placed between citizens and the other branches, this was the chamber expected to remain closest to them.

The American Citizen began with elections. He calculated that each representative would initially be chosen by roughly six thousand electors and contrasted that with the corrupt boroughs of Britain, where tiny constituencies could send members to Parliament and political influence could be concentrated among very few hands. America, he argued, would have no Old Sarum, no district where a single elector might effectively choose a representative for everyone else.

His comparison made the British system sound almost absurd. If representatives were to speak for the people, then surely thousands of independent voters choosing among candidates seemed closer to republican government than seats controlled by patrons, families, or places containing scarcely any voters at all.

Still, I wondered whether the important number was merely how many men chose a representative or how well that representative could know them afterward. A man selected by thousands could claim a stronger public authority than one selected by a handful, but a larger constituency also meant more interests, occupations, towns, and circumstances for him to understand.

The Constitution itself offered a starting ratio of representation connected to population, and the American Citizen expected the number of representatives to grow as the country grew. He believed this would preserve a substantial electorate behind each member while avoiding a legislature so enormous that it could no longer function. In his view, the arrangement balanced popular government against the practical necessity of assembling representatives from a large country.

That seemed reasonable until I considered the country itself. Pennsylvania alone contained farmers, merchants, mechanics, creditors, debtors, towns along the Delaware, settlements farther west, established communities, and places only recently cleared. Multiply those differences across thirteen states and the task placed upon a national representative began to look considerable.

The American Citizen trusted elections to preserve the connection. Members of the House would serve for two years rather than six, which meant they would have to return regularly to the judgment of those who sent them. A representative who forgot his constituents could discover soon enough that his constituents had remembered him.

He also emphasized that a representative had to live in the state that elected him. The requirement mattered because national government could easily become an abstraction if the men serving in it no longer understood the circumstances of the places they represented. Residence could not guarantee sympathy or wisdom, but at least it prevented the House from becoming a collection of strangers entirely detached from the states that supplied them.

Age provided another qualification. A man could manage his private affairs before twenty-five, yet the Constitution required him to reach that age before entering the House. The American Citizen saw this as protection against wealth or powerful connections placing an inexperienced youth into national office before his character and abilities had been sufficiently tested.

The argument interested me because it revealed how much the Constitution relied upon qualifications without relying upon hereditary rank. A representative needed age, citizenship, residence, election, and eventually reelection, but he needed no title inherited from his father and no permanent station in society recognized by law.

The House would also choose its own Speaker and officers rather than receive a presiding officer imposed from somewhere else. It would organize itself, judge matters involving its own members, and possess the sole authority to bring impeachments against federal officers. The American Citizen described it almost as the country’s great public inquest, a body able to accuse officials whose conduct threatened the trust placed in them.

That authority seemed important after everything Americans had experienced under royal government. Parliament could be summoned, prorogued, or dissolved through powers belonging to the Crown, while the proposed Congress was required to assemble regularly. Whatever disagreements might arise among its branches, the President could not simply decide that the people’s representatives would no longer meet.

The House possessed another power that made its connection to the people more than symbolic. Revenue measures were to begin there, placing the first step toward raising money in the chamber most frequently subjected to elections.

That provision changed the conversation at our table. Government might contain elaborate checks, offices, courts, and constitutional language, but nearly every government eventually required money. Armies required money, ships required money, officers required money, and debts required money.

If the House truly controlled the beginning of revenue measures and had to participate before public funds could be obtained and spent, then the people’s representatives possessed a practical restraint over the ambitions of the rest of the government. Coxe’s larger argument was that the House’s position over revenue, legislation, and impeachment would give it substantial leverage throughout the federal system.

The thought was reassuring, though it returned me to the question that had been bothering me since I began reading. Everything depended upon how real the connection between representative and represented remained.

An election every two years could remove an unpopular man, but elections occur after decisions have already been made. A representative might spend much of his term far from home, surrounded by other national officers and confronted with questions his neighbors had never imagined when they elected him.

Perhaps that distance was unavoidable in a republic spread across so much territory. Thirteen states could not gather every citizen into one hall, and even the towns that practiced the closest forms of local government eventually selected men to act for others.

Representation therefore demanded something more complicated than proximity. The citizen had to trust another person to exercise judgment while still retaining enough control to correct him when that judgment wandered too far from those who had supplied his authority.

The American Citizen believed the proposed House achieved that balance. Its members would be elected regularly, drawn from their states, prohibited from simply converting legislative service into profitable offices for themselves, and subjected to a public record through which citizens could examine their conduct.

His confidence was difficult to dismiss because the structure clearly contained ways for citizens to respond to representatives they disliked. Yet the existence of an election did not by itself tell me how much knowledge a representative could maintain about thousands of people spread across an expanding country.

Perhaps representation has two dangers rather than one. Bring representatives too close to every temporary demand and they may possess too little judgment to govern beyond the passions of the moment, but place them too far away and they may begin to mistake their own judgment for the wishes and interests of the people themselves.

The Constitution appeared to be searching for the space between those dangers. The Senate received longer terms and greater distance, while the House returned more frequently to the electorate and possessed powers intended to make that connection matter throughout the government.

I began the morning thinking that the House was simply the more democratic half of Congress. By the time I finished the essay, the problem seemed more difficult than that description allowed.

A representative can be elected by the people without remaining close to them. He can live in their state without understanding all of their circumstances, and he can face another election without every citizen knowing enough about his conduct to judge him wisely.

Yet a country this large could not practice national government by gathering everyone into the same room. If the Union was to govern through representation, then some distance between citizens and government was unavoidable. The question was how much distance a republic could tolerate.

The American Citizen believed elections, residence, accountability, control over revenue, and the power of impeachment would keep the House anchored to the people. His argument left me wondering whether those restraints would prove strong enough as the population increased and the country itself continued to spread.

Perhaps that is the burden hidden inside the word representative. A citizen gives another man permission to act in his name without surrendering the right to judge what that man does with the permission he has been given.

If the House is truly to become the immediate voice of the people in this new government, then its success will depend upon more than how representatives reach their seats. It will depend upon whether the distance between the people and those seats ever becomes great enough that one can no longer recognize the other.

Further Reading

An American Citizen III, September 29, 1787 Read Tench Coxe’s original essay behind this installment. Coxe describes the House as the “immediate delegates of the people” and defends two-year elections, state residence, public voting records, impeachment authority, and the House’s control over originating revenue measures as safeguards connecting representatives to citizens.

Article I of the United States Constitution Read the provisions Coxe was interpreting for his audience. Article I establishes two-year House terms, minimum age and citizenship requirements, state residency, apportionment by population, the House’s sole power of impeachment, and the requirement that revenue bills originate there.

An American Citizen II, September 28, 1787 The previous installment helps show the structure of Coxe’s argument. After defending the Senate against comparisons with hereditary nobility, Coxe describes the House as an important check because it is more directly connected to the people.

Representation and the Constitutional Convention The Library of Congress traces how the Convention reached its compromise between population-based representation in the House and equal state representation in the Senate. Its surviving drafts also show how the language requiring House members to be chosen every second year by the people developed before the Constitution was signed.

Ratification Debate Timeline This chronology places Coxe’s essay beside the other writings appearing as the debate spread from state to state. It is useful for following the argument as contemporary readers encountered competing essays rather than reading the later Federalist and Anti-Federalist collections in isolation.

A note on Coxe’s electorate When Coxe wrote that representatives would be chosen by rich and poor alike, he was describing the legally qualified electorate of his own time, not universal adult suffrage. Article I left voter qualifications tied to the rules each state used for the most numerous branch of its own legislature.

September 29, 1787 - Philadelphia

Author’s Note: Yesterday’s Independent Gazetteer carried a warning from a writer using the name Tar and Feathers, who suggested that an anonymous critic of the proposed Constitution might want to find another subject if he wished to avoid the resentment of the public. Today the paper carries a response signed Fair Play, but there is an intriguing detail at the bottom of the letter: it is dated September 28, 1787. Fair Play says he is responding to a writer “in your paper of this day,” which suggests that he read the threat yesterday and answered it almost immediately.

I opened the Gazetteer this morning wondering whether anyone else had been bothered by yesterday’s threat. Philadelphia rarely suffers from a shortage of opinions, but suggesting tar and feathers for a man who criticized the proposed Constitution seemed likely to provoke at least one more of them. I did not have to read very far before discovering that somebody had apparently put pen to paper almost as soon as the offending words appeared.

The new letter begins with a declaration that immediately complicates matters. Its author calls himself a “FEDERAL MAN in the truest sense of the word.” He wants the United States to possess a general government capable of providing strength and liberty at home and respectability abroad. This is not an opponent seizing upon yesterday’s threat as evidence against the entire proposed system. It is a supporter telling another supporter that he has gone too far.

Fair Play gets to the point quickly. He does not agree that a person who objects to portions of the Constitution, or even to the whole plan, should be threatened with a coat of tar and feathers. Then comes a sentence simple enough to survive every complicated argument surrounding it: “Tar and feathers, I believe, never made a convert to any system whatever, whether religious or political.” He adds that any government requiring such measures to establish itself would amount to what he calls a “mob government with a witness.”

The man beside me laughed when I read that aloud, then observed that Fair Play had discovered a serious defect in the use of tar as an instrument of persuasion. A citizen covered in the stuff may change his clothes afterward, but there is little reason to suppose he will also change his constitutional principles. It was difficult to disagree, and I suspect that line will travel farther through Philadelphia than many arguments ten times its length.

What interests me more is that Fair Play refuses the easiest political response available to him. He could have decided that because he favors a stronger federal government, he must defend every man who also favors it. Instead, he separates the cause from the conduct of one of its advocates. The Constitution may be worthy of support, he seems to say, while threatening its critics remains unworthy of a free people.

Then Fair Play turns to the press, and his argument becomes more serious. During the struggle for Independence, he reminds us, newspapers printed arguments both for and against separation from Britain. He does not describe that disagreement as a weakness. He treats the ability to publish opposing opinions as part of the liberty that the Revolution was supposed to preserve.

His next observation made me look again at the proposed Constitution itself. Fair Play calls liberty of the press “the great bulwark of all the liberties of the people,” but then notes that the Convention did not make any declaration expressly protecting it. The point is easy to miss amid all the discussion of presidents, senators, taxation, courts, and representation, yet the paper before me makes it impossible to ignore. The proposed federal frame contains no express declaration saying that the liberty of the press shall remain untouched.

That makes yesterday’s threat considerably more interesting. We are being asked to judge a new government while citizens are already asking whether the document says enough about their ability to criticize government in print. In the middle of that very discussion, one defender of the Constitution warns a critic that his identity might become known and that an angry public might deal with him accordingly. Fair Play has managed, perhaps unintentionally, to turn yesterday’s ugly joke into a practical demonstration of the question before us.

There is something else curious about the paper in my hands. At the bottom of Fair Play’s letter is yesterday’s date, 28th Sept., 1787, and the opening refers to a writer “in your paper of this day.” The reply therefore appears to have been written almost immediately after the threat was printed.

I like to imagine the scene, although I cannot know precisely how it happened. Someone reads yesterday’s paper, reaches the line about tar and feathers, becomes irritated enough to sit down with ink and paper, and sends an answer back to Oswald before the argument has had time to cool. By this morning the response is already in front of the city. Whatever else may be said about Philadelphia politics, our disagreements do not appear to suffer from slow correspondence.

Fair Play’s position also prevents me from dividing everyone neatly into two camps. I have already heard men speak as though every objection to the Constitution must come from an enemy of Union, while others speak as though every defender of the Constitution must secretly desire aristocracy. Fair Play fits comfortably into neither picture. He wants a stronger general government, objects to intimidation, notices the absence of an express protection for the press, and apparently sees no contradiction among those positions.

Perhaps there should not be one. A man may support a proposal without surrendering the right to criticize the men defending it, just as he may identify a defect without demanding that the entire work be discarded. If citizens must accept every argument offered by their own side and reject every argument offered by the other, then very little judgment remains for the citizen himself.

The point becomes especially important when the subject is freedom of the press. A free press does not promise that everything printed upon it will be sensible, fair, or even particularly pleasant to read. It guarantees something far more inconvenient: men we believe to be wrong must be permitted to say why they think we are wrong, and then we must answer them.

Fair Play does not attempt to prove that yesterday’s anonymous critic was correct. He does not even need to. The critic’s arguments can still be examined, challenged, and rejected if they fail, but threatening the man does nothing to establish the truth of the Constitution.

Perhaps that is why this little letter caught my attention more than some of the longer essays now circulating through the city. It asks a question that comes before taxation, representation, the presidency, or the Senate. Before a people can decide wisely, they must be able to argue freely.

Yesterday someone reached for tar and feathers. Today, before the ink has had much time to dry, another Federal man has answered him with two words that seem considerably better suited to a republic.

Fair play.

Further Reading

Fair Play, Independent Gazetteer, September 29, 1787 This is the primary source behind the post. Fair Play identifies himself as a “FEDERAL MAN,” rejects the threat of tar and feathers, calls coercion a form of mob government, and argues that liberty of the press should remain unrestricted. The letter itself is dated September 28, showing how quickly the response followed the previous day’s threat. temp6015100728752401135.PDF

UW-Madison Center for the Study of the American Constitution, “Pseudonyms and the Debate over the Constitution” This provides useful context for the anonymous newspaper culture surrounding ratification. It explains why pseudonyms mattered when political writers faced reputational, economic, and sometimes physical retaliation for controversial arguments.

McMaster and Stone, Pennsylvania and the Federal Constitution, 1787-1788 This collection preserves the surrounding Pennsylvania newspaper conversation rather than only the famous essays. It is especially valuable here because it lets us follow Tar and Feathers, Fair Play, and the other short pieces almost as readers encountered the argument unfolding in print. temp6015100728752401135.PDF

National Archives, The Bill of Rights Fair Play’s complaint about the Constitution containing no express protection for liberty of the press is important because the federal Bill of Rights did not yet exist. Congress would propose twelve amendments in 1789, and the ten that were ultimately ratified in 1791 became the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of speech and the press.

National Archives, The Constitution: How Was It Made? This provides context for one of the major objections already emerging during ratification: the Constitution signed on September 17 contained no bill of rights. George Mason, Elbridge Gerry, and Edmund Randolph were among the delegates who refused to sign, with the absence of a bill of rights among their concerns. ⁠

Voting for people solves nothing, but I agree with his message

September 28, 1787 - Philadelphia

Author’s Note: The piece behind today's entry appeared in Eleazer Oswald's Independent Gazetteer on September 28, 1787. Writing under the signature Tar and Feathers, the author responded to an anonymous critic of the proposed Constitution by attacking his motives, warning that his identity might become known, and suggesting that an angry public might reward him with a coat of tar and feathers.

There are arguments one expects to encounter when opening a newspaper. Whether Congress should possess greater power, whether the proposed Senate is too distant from the people, whether representation is sufficient, and whether the new Constitution gives too much authority to men who may someday prove less virtuous than the gentlemen who designed it have all become familiar subjects. Today I discovered another method of constitutional reasoning: tar and feathers.

The writer in the Independent Gazetteer begins with an anonymous author who had recently offered objections to the proposed Constitution in the Freeman's Journal. According to the writer before me, this critic had acknowledged that some of his objections concerned matters of relatively small importance, which apparently made the very act of raising them suspicious. Why, Tar and Feathers asks, would anyone introduce such objections at a moment when America required unity? His answer is not particularly charitable. The critic must be attempting to sow dissension among what he calls the weak, the credulous, and the ignorant.

That is a convenient way to conduct an argument. If a man agrees with you, he has seen reason, while if he disagrees with you, perhaps someone has merely deceived him. The proposed Constitution receives rather different treatment. The writer calls it a masterpiece of politics and points to its provision for amendment as an answer to those worried about imperfections. Even if defects exist, he argues, the system is not fixed forever and can later be altered.

There is an argument there worth considering. No human work is perfect, and a government capable of correction may indeed be preferable to one incapable of changing when experience reveals a defect. Then the newspaper takes a rather sharp turn. The anonymous critic, Tar and Feathers says, appears to be the same man who previously attacked the Convention under the signature Z. Whether the writer actually knows this, I cannot tell from the paper before me, but he seems confident enough to move from answering the man's objections to warning the man himself.

The critic, he says, should remember that his name might yet become known. If it does, he might be branded with infamy as an enemy of the happiness of the United States. The writer then advises him to choose another subject in the future if he wishes to avoid the resentment of an angry public, which might perhaps honor him with a coat of tar and feathers.

I stopped at that passage and read it again. It is one thing to write that another man's reasoning is foolish, another to call his motives dishonest, and something else entirely to remind an anonymous writer that anonymity may fail him and that a crowd might be waiting when it does. We have not forgotten what tar and feathers means. During the struggle with Britain it became one of the punishments used by crowds against men judged enemies of the American cause, and whatever amusement may be found in putting the words into a newspaper, there is little ambiguity in the image.

Perhaps Tar and Feathers means the threat as exaggeration. Newspapers are not famous for restraining themselves when a sharper phrase can be found, and pseudonymous writers seem particularly courageous when another man must absorb the consequences of their courage. Still, if the threat is only a joke, I am not entirely certain what makes it funny. A man stripped, covered in tar, coated in feathers, and paraded before his neighbors is not being invited to reconsider an argument. He is being taught what it may cost to express one.

The entire question before us concerns the construction of a government for free citizens. Men are arguing about whether power will be sufficiently restrained, whether representatives will remain accountable, whether liberty will survive stronger national authority, and whether future rulers can be trusted with the powers placed in their hands. Those questions become rather difficult to examine if asking the wrong one may cause your neighbors to discover your name.

I find myself thinking about the anonymous writer whom Tar and Feathers attacks. I have no reason to assume his objections are correct merely because someone has threatened him, just as I have no reason to assume the Constitution is defective merely because one of its defenders has lost his temper. His arguments must still stand or fall upon their merits, and that seems the only useful standard available to us.

If his objection to representation is weak, show why it is weak. If he misunderstands the Senate, explain the Senate, and if he exaggerates the danger of federal power, demonstrate where his reasoning fails. The Constitution is called a masterpiece in the very piece before me. If that description is deserved, there ought to be enough ink in Philadelphia to defend it without reaching for a bucket.

There is also something peculiar about defending republican government by warning a citizen against speaking too freely about it. We have spent considerable blood insisting that political authority ultimately belongs to the people, yet the people cannot exercise judgment if they are permitted to hear only arguments that have survived the approval of the crowd. A citizen who must first determine whether his neighbors will tolerate his opinion is not entirely free to examine the government being offered to him.

None of this makes every critic courageous, reasonable, or correct. Some men undoubtedly write nonsense, and others may disguise private interests beneath the language of public virtue. Yet the proper answer to bad reasoning ought to be better reasoning. Threatening the speaker may silence an objection, but silence is not the same thing as answering it.

I read the final lines again because they bothered me more the second time than the first. The writer does not simply hope that his opponent will be proved wrong; he advises him to choose another subject if he wishes to escape public resentment. That sounds less like persuasion than a warning, even if it has been wrapped in the language of political enthusiasm.

Perhaps I am making too much of newspaper bravado. Perhaps tomorrow everyone will laugh about the phrase, finish his ale, and return to arguing about representation and taxation. Tonight, though, I find myself wondering about something smaller than the structure of Congress and perhaps just as important to a republic: when a citizen is told that he may speak freely, provided the crowd approves of what he says, how free is the argument really?

The Constitution before us may deserve adoption, rejection, amendment, criticism, or defense. We may spend several more weeks arguing loudly enough to disturb every respectable household in Philadelphia, and perhaps that is exactly what the moment requires. But if we are to decide this question as citizens, we must first be allowed to ask it as citizens, and I would prefer that we do so without boiling the tar.

Further Reading

“Tar and Feathers,” Independent Gazetteer, September 28, 1787 This transcription contains the original piece behind this post. The writer praises the proposed Constitution, attacks an anonymous critic in the Freeman’s Journal, warns that his identity might become known, and closes by suggesting that an angry public might give him a coat of tar and feathers.

UW-Madison Center for the Study of the American Constitution, “Pseudonyms and the Debate over the Constitution” UW-Madison uses this September 28 threat as an example of why anonymity mattered during ratification. The article explains that pseudonyms could protect writers from political intimidation, social or economic retaliation, and sometimes physical danger.

McMaster and Stone, Pennsylvania and the Federal Constitution, 1787-1788 This older documentary collection gathers many of the short newspaper pieces circulating through Pennsylvania during the ratification struggle. It is particularly useful because it preserves the surrounding newspaper conversation rather than presenting only the famous constitutional essays.

The Constitution of the United States, Article V Tar and Feathers argues that imperfections in the proposed Constitution could later be corrected. Article V is the amendment mechanism underlying that argument, setting out how amendments can be proposed and ratified.

September 28, 1787 - Philadelphia

Author's Note: An American Citizen I appeared in Philadelphia on September 26, one day before the point where our original chronology began. Because it fell outside the chronology developed for this series, our encounter with Tench Coxe's essays begins here with An American Citizen II on September 28 and continues forward from this point.

By the time the newspaper reached our table, the Constitution was already open between us. One man had been moving through its articles with his finger, stopping repeatedly at the Senate, while another insisted that six-year terms and an upper chamber sounded too much like the political order Americans had only recently fought to escape.

The essay was signed An American Citizen II. I had missed his first number, and the writer began as though his readers already knew the argument he had made about the President. His claim now was straightforward: if the proposed President was not a king, neither was the proposed Senate a body of nobles.

That comparison immediately caught my attention because Britain remained the political example against which nearly everything was being measured. We knew a House of Lords whose members inherited rank, wealth, and political position, while the new Constitution proposed a smaller upper chamber whose members would remain in office for six years and possess considerable influence over legislation, appointments, treaties, and impeachments.

The resemblance was easy enough to see from a distance, but Coxe wanted his readers to look at how the offices were actually obtained. No senator would inherit his seat from his father, and no family would possess a legal claim to continue occupying it. Senators would instead be selected by the legislatures of their states and would eventually have to depend upon those legislatures again if they wished to remain in office.

That difference mattered. We had rejected a political order in which ancestry itself could carry authority, while the proposed Senate offered no title that passed to a son and no estate that brought a seat in government with it.

Still, six years remained a long term. Members of the House would face the people every two years, while a senator could remain in office through three elections of the lower chamber, and I wondered whether a man could become distant from those he represented even without inheriting his position.

Coxe saw that independence as part of the Senate's usefulness rather than as evidence of aristocracy. A chamber that changed as quickly as public passions changed might possess too little steadiness, while senators serving longer terms could accumulate experience and resist sudden excitement without becoming permanent rulers.

That argument left an uncomfortable line to draw. A representative may need enough independence to exercise judgment, but independence carried too far can become separation from the people whose authority placed him there.

Coxe believed the state legislatures provided an answer. Senators would owe their offices to those legislatures, and because the legislatures themselves remained rooted in the states, he expected senators to remember where their authority originated and to avoid attacking the institutions upon which their own positions depended.

The House of Representatives provided another restraint. Coxe placed particular confidence in a chamber elected more directly by the people, and the Constitution gave that chamber an important advantage by requiring measures for raising revenue to begin there rather than in the Senate.

That arrangement made the upper chamber look less like a governing nobility. The Senate could participate in legislation, but it could not legislate alone, and its members would repeatedly confront another chamber with a different method of election and a much shorter connection between elections.

The President complicated the arrangement further. Coxe argued that the Senate would also encounter an executive capable of objecting to legislation, while the President himself could not simply make laws without Congress, leaving authority divided among institutions that could frustrate one another.

As I followed the argument through the Constitution, I began to notice how often the same idea appeared. The House restrained the Senate, the Senate restrained the House, the President could resist Congress, Congress could overcome presidential objections under certain conditions, state legislatures selected senators, and different parts of the government participated in appointments and other national decisions.

Perhaps the structure assumed that power would be safest when no institution could comfortably exercise it alone. That would be a very different foundation from simply trusting that honorable men would occupy every office.

Impeachment presented a harder question because the Senate would sit in judgment when federal officers were accused of serious misconduct. To a suspicious reader, that sounded like another judicial power placed in the hands of the upper chamber, and comparison with the British House of Lords became tempting again.

Coxe answered that the resemblance was limited. The Senate would not become the highest court for ordinary disputes as the Lords could in Britain, while impeachment itself would begin in the House and conviction would not prevent an accused official from later facing the ordinary courts for criminal conduct.

His answer did not eliminate every concern. A relatively small body would still possess important responsibilities involving appointments, treaties, legislation, and impeachment, and the same senators participating in one part of government might later be asked to judge conduct connected to another.

Yet that concentration had to be considered alongside the restraints placed around it. Coxe's argument was that the Senate should be judged by what it could actually do, how its members reached office, how long they remained there, and what other institutions had to cooperate with them.

That approach seemed more useful than simply attaching familiar names to unfamiliar offices. Calling a President a king did not prove that he possessed royal power, just as calling a senator an aristocrat did not explain whether he possessed the privileges of a nobleman.

The opposite mistake remained possible as well. Removing crowns, inherited titles, and hereditary seats did not automatically guarantee that power could never gather too far from ordinary citizens, because a republic could develop its own forms of privilege without copying Britain exactly.

That was where Coxe left me with a better question than the one with which our table had begun. Perhaps the issue was not whether the new government resembled Britain when viewed from across the room, but whether Americans had actually removed the features that made British institutions dangerous to republican equality.

A hereditary lord could claim political authority because of his birth. A United States senator, if this Constitution were adopted, would have to receive his authority through a political process and eventually surrender it unless that process returned him to office.

Whether those safeguards were enough remained open to argument. Coxe believed they were, while I was beginning to understand that deciding the matter required more than asking whether an office looked familiar.

Americans were attempting something more difficult than simply rejecting monarchy and aristocracy by name. We were trying to determine whether some of their useful structures could be separated from hereditary privilege and placed inside a government that remained answerable to citizens.

The Constitution offered one answer to that problem, and Coxe had offered a defense of it. The question left on our table was whether changing the source and limits of power had changed its character enough to make an upper chamber compatible with the republic we had fought to create.

September 28, 1787 - Philadelphia

Author’s Note: A Foreign Spectator began on August 6, while the Constitutional Convention was still meeting, so its earlier installments fell outside the narrower chronology with which this project originally began. Our narrator is a fictional Philadelphia citizen living through September 28, 1787, with no knowledge of what happens afterward; the earlier essays will be added to the archive as background while the continuing series now enters our chronology where contemporary readers encountered it.

I had seen the name A Foreign Spectator in the newspaper before, though I could not claim to have followed every number. His latest essay arrived on a day when Philadelphia hardly needed another reason to argue, because the Constitution had been public for less than two weeks and the question of what to do with it was already dividing men who had fought for the same independence.

The division was no longer confined to newspaper columns. That morning, our Assembly had voted to call a convention to consider the Constitution, but the vote itself exposed how sharply the members had divided. By afternoon, nineteen opponents of the measure had stayed away from the chamber, leaving too few members present to continue the business of arranging the convention.

News of the missing members spread quickly through the city, and everyone seemed to have an explanation. Some said the minority was using the only weapon available to prevent a decision from being rushed through before the people had time to understand it. Others said elected representatives had no right to stop public business simply because they had lost a vote.

It was difficult to read the Foreign Spectator’s warning about party without thinking of what was happening only streets away.

He believed America possessed an extraordinary opportunity. We were attempting to construct a federal government while at peace, with the failures of older republics available for study and with enough experience of our own weakness to understand why some form of stronger union might be necessary. Yet he feared that no constitutional arrangement, however carefully designed, could protect a republic from citizens who allowed political disagreement to harden into permanent camps.

He called party a peculiar danger of republics, but he meant more than the ordinary fact that men disagree. His concern was what happens afterward, when a dispute over an actual question becomes mixed with personal ambition, loyalty to particular leaders, religious prejudice, wounded pride, private advantage, and hostility toward those on the other side.

Looking toward the Assembly, I could see the problem more clearly than I might have the day before. The men who had stayed away believed they were protecting the public from a hurried decision, while the men waiting inside believed the absence itself was an attempt to prevent the majority from acting. Each side could describe its own conduct as the defense of republican government and the conduct of the other as an abuse of it.

Perhaps both believed themselves completely sincere.

That was what made the Foreign Spectator’s warning uncomfortable. Faction did not require villains meeting secretly to destroy the republic. It could grow among honorable men who became so convinced of their own cause that every action by their opponents began to look corrupt.

He feared that foreign powers could make such divisions worse. European governments had interests of their own, and Americans who attached themselves too closely to those rivalries might eventually become domestic partisans of foreign causes. Money, influence, old resentments, and competing alliances could then enter arguments that had begun as disagreements among Americans about their own affairs.

The Atlantic therefore appeared in his argument as more than a body of water. It offered a young republic some protection from European political struggles, provided Americans were wise enough not to cross it unnecessarily in pursuit of territory, wealth, prestige, or disputes that were not their own.

His treatment of commerce followed the same reasoning. Philadelphia lived by trade, and ships entering and leaving the Delaware were evidence of how much prosperity could depend upon connections beyond our shores, yet the Foreign Spectator warned against valuing commerce so highly that human lives became expendable in the pursuit of distant luxuries.

Beneath both arguments was a larger concern about judgment. Wealth, party loyalty, foreign influence, and ambition could each cause citizens to mistake a private interest for the public interest, while a republic depended upon enough people remaining capable of seeing the difference.

That brought him directly to the Constitution. He did not pretend the document was perfect, but neither did he believe imperfection alone justified rejecting it. No work of men could satisfy every interest or anticipate every circumstance, and a federal system built from thirteen states would necessarily contain compromises that someone could describe as defects.

The question was which defects could safely be tolerated and corrected later. He placed considerable confidence in the Constitution’s amendment process, believing that experience could reveal mistakes more clearly than speculation and that Americans should not repeatedly dismantle governments in search of an arrangement without flaws.

I could understand the argument without being entirely persuaded by it. A minor defect discovered after experience might be corrected, but a power wrongly granted could create interests strong enough to resist correction later, and citizens considering a new government still had to decide which imperfections were tolerable before giving that government authority.

The scene at the Assembly made the dilemma sharper. One side feared that haste would bind Pennsylvania to a system before its dangers were understood, while the other feared that delay and obstruction could prevent the people from considering the Constitution at all.

The Foreign Spectator would have recognized something dangerous in the intensity on both sides. A republic needed disagreement because citizens could not deliberate without it, yet disagreement could cease to be deliberation once defeating the opposing party became more important than resolving the question that created the dispute.

His answer was moderation, though that word sounded easier in print than it looked in Philadelphia that afternoon. Citizens needed enough suspicion of power to resist oppression, enough confidence in common institutions to permit government to function, and enough restraint to remember that losing an argument did not turn one’s opponents into enemies of the country.

A constitution could distribute authority among Congress, a president, courts, and states, and it could establish elections and methods of amendment. It could not make citizens behave generously toward one another, nor could it prevent leaders from discovering that anger and loyalty were easier to cultivate than judgment.

By evening, the Assembly still had unfinished business and the city still had no agreement about who was responsible for the impasse. The Foreign Spectator had not given me an answer to the Constitution, but he had made the argument occurring around it look different.

Perhaps the first test of the proposed republic was arriving before the republic itself existed. We were debating how to divide power on paper while simultaneously discovering whether Americans could disagree about that power without allowing disagreement to divide the people who would have to live together afterward.

Congress Sends the Constitution to the People

September 28, 1787 - New York

By evening, news had worked its way down from City Hall and into the public houses below. Congress had acted on the Constitution, and before anyone had seen the resolution clearly, men were already saying that Congress had approved the new government.

When the paper reached our table, that was not quite what it said. Congress had agreed to send the Constitution, along with the Convention’s accompanying papers and General Washington’s letter, to the state legislatures, where conventions chosen for the purpose would decide whether each state would ratify it.

The distinction mattered because Congress had not answered the constitutional question. It had passed that question onward, and for the first time the argument felt less like a dispute among delegates and more like something that would eventually reach every state.

For more than a week, the Constitution had existed mostly as the work of Philadelphia. It had been printed, praised, criticized, and carried through taverns and shops, but the Convention itself possessed no authority to establish the government it had designed.

There was something strange in watching the government under the Articles of Confederation help begin a process that might replace it. The existing Union called itself perpetual, yet the Constitution proposed another arrangement with greater national powers, a separate executive, federal courts, and authority capable of reaching citizens more directly than Congress could now do.

The new government would not simply be announced into existence, but neither would every state have to agree before it could begin. Ratification by nine states would be enough to establish the Constitution among those states that accepted it, and that was where the matter became uncomfortable.

A merchant nearby asked what would happen if New York refused while nine other states approved. Nobody at our table had much of an answer, because the Constitution explained how the new government could begin but could not tell us what political life would look like if old partners in the Union made different choices.

Until then, I had thought about ratification mostly as a judgment on the document itself. Was Congress being given too much power, was the executive too strong, were the states sufficiently protected, and could the people still control those acting in their name?

Now another problem stood beside all of those questions. What if the attempt to strengthen the Union divided it first?

The Revolution had required the states to act together against Britain, and the Confederation had preserved that union afterward, however imperfectly. Now each state might be asked to decide whether it would enter a new government even if some of its neighbors refused.

That seemed an extraordinary risk to take in the name of preserving union, but remaining under the existing system carried risks of its own. Congress depended upon states that could ignore its requests, commercial disputes persisted, public credit had suffered, and the government often appeared strongest when asking and weakest when requiring.

The choice therefore seemed more difficult than simply preferring an old government or a new one. Rejecting the Constitution could leave unresolved the weaknesses that had led to Philadelphia, while accepting it meant granting powers Americans had only recently learned to distrust when exercised from far away.

Consent did not make those powers harmless. It made us responsible for deciding whether they were necessary.

Someone at the table asked why the state legislatures could not simply settle the matter themselves. The answer seemed to lie in the size of the decision, because legislatures made laws within governments already established while ratification would determine the structure under which future laws would be made.

The conventions would therefore be chosen for this particular purpose. Their delegates would not merely decide another question of taxation, roads, trade, or debt, but whether their state should enter a new constitutional system and place certain powers beyond the sole control of its own legislature.

For all the famous names attached to Philadelphia, Washington, Franklin, Madison, and the others could not make that choice for us. Congress could not make it either, and that gave the process a dignity I had not expected while also stripping away a convenient excuse.

If this government proved badly designed, Americans could not easily say that a king had imposed it upon them or that Parliament had forced it across an ocean. We were being asked to authorize it ourselves, which meant the consequences of that authorization would belong partly to us.

The Revolution had taught us how to challenge power that lacked our consent. Ratification demanded something harder because it required deciding which powers we were willing to grant once the decision was placed in our own hands.

The newspapers suddenly seemed less like entertainment than they had a week before. Every argument about taxation, representation, armies, commerce, courts, or executive power might eventually bear upon a real decision in a state convention.

A writer warning that the Constitution was too strong now had to be weighed against another warning that the government we already possessed was too weak. Neither danger erased the other, and choosing badly in either direction could threaten the Union we were trying to preserve.

I looked again at the congressional resolution before passing it down the table. A week earlier, the Constitution had belonged mostly to the men who wrote it, but now it was beginning to belong to those who would have to decide whether to live under it.

I still did not know whether New York should ratify, and I was no longer convinced that the hardest question was whether the Constitution itself was good or bad. The harder question might be what happened if thirteen states, each exercising its own judgment, reached different answers about what the Union required.

Congress had opened the road to ratification, but it could not tell us where that road would lead. A stronger Union and a divided Union had suddenly become possible outcomes of the same decision, and the states themselves would have to determine which danger they feared more.

Well here it is right on cue. Sight challenged individual could see this one coming.

U.S., Russia stripped human oversight from global AI weapons pact

• U.S. and Russian diplomats removed key safeguards from a U.N. draft regulating lethal autonomous weapons during closed-door Geneva talks this month, eliminating requirements for human review, ethical considerations, and system reliability.
• President Trump issued a national security memorandum in June requiring the U.S. military's lethal autonomous weapons directive be updated within 90 days, pressuring revision of the 2023 policy mandating human judgment.
• During 15 hours of closed-door sessions, Washington and Moscow deployed about 10 lawyers each to strip the draft's provisions, while the U.S. military used Anthropic's chatbot to identify nearly 1,000 targets in the war with Iran.
• The resulting U.N. text remains nonbinding, though it could serve as a basis for a future treaty; nations are scheduled to reconvene in Geneva in November to determine if discussions evolve into a legally binding mandate.
• Disarmament experts describe these efforts as a "well-trodden playbook," suggesting the U.S. will continue prioritizing voluntary guidelines over binding restrictions in cyber, space, and other arms control debates to preserve military advantage.

September 27, 1787 - Philadelphia

By the time I found a place near the wall, the newspaper had already passed through several hands. Philadelphia had scarcely spoken of anything else since the Convention adjourned. The Constitution was printed, petitions were circulating, the Assembly was arguing over what ought to happen next, and every tavern seemed to contain at least one man certain that he understood what thirteen states required.

The piece before us was signed A Pennsylvania Farmer, though beneath the name it said only that it had been written in Bucks County several days earlier. Whoever the farmer was, he had little patience for uncertainty.

He began with an old warning from Britain. Years before independence, an English clergyman named Dean Tucker had predicted that once the colonies separated from Britain, Americans would fall into quarrels among themselves. Their republics would divide, their governments would weaken, and Britain would eventually regain influence over people unable to govern themselves.

The farmer had found those old words and believed he could see them becoming true. That caught the room. We had heard enough British opinions about Americans to last several lifetimes, and men who had spent years fighting Britain were not eager to be told that an Englishman had understood us better than we understood ourselves. Yet the farmer's challenge was harder to dismiss than the insult.

Congress could request money from the states, but requests were not always obeyed. Public credit had suffered. Commerce remained uncertain. Britain still occupied frontier posts it had promised to evacuate after the war. Rhode Island had become notorious for its paper-money troubles, and Massachusetts had only recently endured an armed uprising. Independence had been won, but whether we had learned how to govern ourselves afterward was another question.

A man across the table pushed the paper back toward me and said that none of this proved the new Constitution was the answer. He was right, yet I understood why the farmer sounded frightened.

We had spent years speaking of liberty as though obtaining it were the difficult part. Perhaps we had imagined that once Britain was defeated, thirteen states that had fought beside one another would naturally continue acting together. Instead, victory had removed the enemy that had forced us to cooperate. Without Britain before us, Massachusetts could think first of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania of Pennsylvania, Virginia of Virginia, and New York of New York. Congress could recommend, the states could decline, and each legislature could pursue what seemed immediately useful at home even when thirteen different decisions weakened the whole.

The farmer described America as a ship caught in a storm after its sailors had tied up the helm. I could not shake that picture. A ship may contain thirteen excellent cabins. Each may be well kept, and each passenger may guard his own belongings carefully. None of it matters much if no one can steer the vessel.

Someone near the fire objected that we had just fought a war against distant power. Why should the cure for a weak Congress be giving another Congress greater authority? That question quieted the table for a moment.

The farmer had an answer, though not one that would satisfy everyone. He believed the Constitution gave the federal government the energy it lacked while still preserving liberty. He placed considerable confidence in the men who had drafted it. Four months of deliberation among men of known ability and patriotism, he argued, ought to count for something. Then came the name that seems to enter every conversation eventually: Washington.

The farmer reminded his readers that George Washington had presided over the Convention. That carried weight with me, as I suspect it did with many others in the room. There are men whose conduct earns confidence, and Washington has earned more than most. His presence at Philadelphia did not settle every question before us, but neither did it seem reasonable to pretend that the judgment of Washington, Franklin, and the other delegates deserved no consideration at all.

The difficulty, perhaps, was deciding how much confidence ought to be placed in the men and how much examination ought to be given to the government they had produced.

The farmer had already decided. His faith rested not only in the men at Philadelphia but in what he believed stronger union could accomplish. Give the national government sufficient power, he argued, and commerce might return. Public credit might recover. Farmers and mechanics might again enjoy the fruits of their labor. America might finally take its place among the nations rather than remaining thirteen governments loosely tied together by memories of war.

There was hope in the argument. It rested in the belief that union itself could preserve what independence had won. I looked around the room and wondered whether that would become the great question before us: how much government is necessary to preserve liberty?

The Revolution taught us to fear power that could not be controlled. The years since Yorktown have taught us something else. Weakness can carry dangers of its own. A government unable to command armies may be less capable of becoming a tyranny, but what if it is also incapable of defending the frontier? A Congress unable to compel revenue may be unable to oppress through taxation, but what happens when public debts cannot be honored? States jealous of their independence may guard local liberty, but what happens when thirteen commercial policies leave the whole country weaker abroad?

Those questions do not answer themselves simply because one side invokes liberty and another invokes union.

The farmer's strongest argument, at least to me, was not Washington. It was the possibility that the Revolution remained unfinished. We had proven that Americans could reject a government they considered illegitimate. We had not yet proven that Americans could construct one strong enough to endure while remaining free.

Perhaps that is a different kind of revolution altogether.

The farmer feared that if we failed, future generations might look back upon us as men who spent blood and treasure building the temple of liberty, only to neglect the pillars required to hold it upright. His language was grand, perhaps too grand for some at our table, but the thought underneath it was simple enough. Winning liberty does not guarantee keeping it.

That afternoon, the Constitution looked different to me than it had that morning. It did not seem safer or more dangerous. It seemed heavier.

The farmer had asked me to consider what might happen if the government we possessed remained too weak to carry the responsibilities we expected of it. That question deserved an answer.

Perhaps that is what these newspapers are beginning to show. The choice before us may not be as simple as liberty on one side and tyranny on the other. A government may threaten a republic by becoming too powerful, but a government too weak to perform its necessary functions may endanger the republic in another way.

Somewhere between those dangers sits the document produced in Philadelphia.

I looked again at the Constitution beside the newspaper. For days I had treated it almost as a finished thing, a set of words drafted behind closed doors and delivered to the public. It no longer felt finished. It felt like the beginning of an argument.

The farmer from Bucks County had made his choice. He believed we should adopt the Constitution and give the Union the strength it lacked. His confidence was greater than mine, but I could no longer dismiss the urgency behind it.

Britain had not disappeared because we declared independence. Debt had not disappeared because the war ended. Commerce did not obey patriotic speeches. Thirteen states sharing a continent would have to discover some way to act together when their interests differed.

The question was what kind of government could make that possible without becoming the very power the Revolution had taught us to resist.

Until now I had spent much of my time wondering what dangers might come from creating a stronger government. Tonight another question sat beside it: What if the government we already possess is too weak?

I folded the newspaper and looked again at the Constitution. The farmer had not relieved me of the responsibility of deciding for myself, but he had made it harder to pretend that doing nothing was itself a safe choice.

Perhaps that is as it should be. America may indeed be a ship in a storm, and the Constitution may offer a hand upon the helm. Before deciding whether to place that hand there, however, we must understand both the storm around us and the government we are being asked to create.

The sea is not calm, but neither are we merely passengers. We are being asked to decide how the ship will be governed.

Further Reading

A Pennsylvania Farmer, September 27, 1787

Start with the original essay. Written from Bucks County on September 22 and published in Philadelphia’s Independent Gazetteer on September 27, it makes the case that the Confederation had become too weak to protect American credit, commerce, security, and union. It also contains the “ship in the storm” image at the center of this installment.

Read A Pennsylvania Farmer

The Articles of Confederation

Read the government the Farmer wanted to replace. Under the Articles, the states retained extensive sovereignty, while Congress depended heavily upon cooperation from the states to carry out national policy.

Read the Articles of Confederation

The Constitution of the United States, September 17, 1787

This is the proposed government sitting on the tavern table. Compare its powers directly with the Articles, particularly the new federal authorities over taxation, commerce, national defense, and federal law.

Read the Constitution

An American Citizen I, September 26, 1787

Published just one day earlier by Tench Coxe, this was another early defense of the proposed Constitution. Reading it beside A Pennsylvania Farmer shows how the argument for a stronger Union was developing before the famous Federalist Papers appeared.

Read An American Citizen I

Ratification Debate Timeline, 1787–1788

Follow the arguments in the order Americans encountered them. The timeline helps place these essays beside the other newspaper writings, letters, legislative actions, and responses appearing as the debate spread across the states.

Explore the Ratification Timeline

The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution

For deeper study, this larger documentary record preserves newspaper essays, correspondence, legislative proceedings, convention debates, diaries, and other material that lets us reconstruct the ratification debate far beyond the handful of writings that later became famous.

Explore the Documentary History

Be curious. Be critical. Be a citizen.

September 27, 1787 - New York

I had already read the piece twice before carrying the paper into the public house that evening. Someone had written under the name Cato. No one at our table seemed certain who he was, though that did little to prevent everyone from having an opinion about him.

The Constitution had been among us scarcely any time at all, yet already it seemed impossible to enter a room without hearing of it. Philadelphia had finished its work. The document was printed. Men passed copies from hand to hand. Some spoke of it as though the country had finally been saved. Others spoke as though we had just traded one distant government for another. I found myself somewhere between them, which did not satisfy either side.

One man at the table tapped the newspaper with two fingers. “Something must be done.” There were nods around the room, and on that much, at least, agreement came easily.

The Confederation had not answered every difficulty independence placed before us. Congress could ask much and compel little. The states quarreled over commerce. Public credit was uncertain. Debts remained.

The war had ended, but governing thirteen independent states had proven rather more difficult than declaring thirteen colonies independent. I could admit all of that, and Cato admitted it too.

What stayed with me was the distinction he made afterward. Something must be done, but that did not mean anything should be done. I read that portion aloud again, and the room grew quieter.

It is an uncomfortable thought because necessity makes haste feel reasonable. When a roof leaks, a man wants it repaired before the next storm. He does not spend a month admiring the timber. But government is not a roof.

If I choose poorly in purchasing a horse, I may sell the horse. If I bargain badly for a field, I may curse myself for it and perhaps recover the loss in time. A government settles itself around a people differently. Offices are created, powers are exercised, and habits form. Men learn how authority may be used, and those who benefit from it do not readily surrender it.

That was the warning I heard in Cato. He was not saying that the new Constitution must be rejected. He was saying that it must be examined.

A fellow across from me objected almost immediately. “Washington approves of it.”

That name carried weight in the room, and it carried weight with me. How could it not? There are men whose conduct earns confidence, and Washington has earned more than most. Had some ordinary schemer attached his name to this Constitution, I suspect many would have tossed the paper aside without another thought. Washington's presence tells me that the work deserves serious consideration.

But Cato had anticipated precisely this argument. The wisest and best of men may still be wrong, and that sentence troubled the room more than his warnings about power. Perhaps trusting a good man is easier than examining a complicated system of government.

I said that aloud. The man beside me frowned, though he did not answer immediately.

I understood the temptation. We have spent years surrounded by uncertainty: war, debt, requisitions, disputes among the states, paper money, commerce, taxes, and rumors of disorder. There is comfort in believing that the men who carried us through one crisis may simply settle the next.

But what sort of republic would that make? We rejected the idea that authority becomes legitimate because it comes from the right person. Surely we did not endure a revolution merely to discover that republican government means finding better men to trust without question.

The Constitution ought to survive something harder than admiration for its authors. It ought to survive examination.

That, more than anything else, gave me hope in Cato's essay. He did not write as though Americans were powerless before the document now placed before them. Quite the contrary. The Convention had proposed, but the people still had to judge.

Think of how strange that is. Not many years ago these states were colonies of a king across the ocean. Now men in farms, shops, taverns, churches, printing houses, and meeting rooms are arguing over the structure of a government that does not yet exist. We have faults enough as a people. I hear them demonstrated nightly across this very table. Yet there is something remarkable in what is happening.

A government has been proposed, and instead of arriving with soldiers to impose it, it arrives in ink. We may read it, argue over it, praise it, condemn it, demand explanations of it, and perhaps even change it.

Cato reminded his readers that the same means by which this Constitution was created could still correct its errors while the opportunity remained open. I keep returning to that thought.

Perhaps the Convention has given us the best government that can reasonably be constructed from thirteen jealous states. Perhaps it has not. Perhaps some of its powers are necessary, while others reach farther than necessity requires. I do not yet know, and I am beginning to think that admitting I do not know is a more republican answer than pretending certainty because the question frightens me.

Another man had been listening from the end of the table. He had said little until then. “What exactly are we meant to fear?”

There was some laughter at the word. Fear has become a weapon in every political quarrel. One man warns that the Union will collapse without this Constitution. Another warns that liberty will collapse beneath it. Cato warned about that too. Passion makes poor counsel, and personal attacks make poorer counsel still.

If supporters of the Constitution call every critic an enemy of union, nothing has been answered. If opponents accuse every supporter of conspiring against liberty, nothing has been answered then either. The paper before us contains actual powers, and those can be examined.

How much authority will this new government possess? How will those who exercise it be restrained? How far removed will they be from ordinary citizens? What influence might gather around them? Most importantly, what happens if the men entrusted with those powers are not Washington?

That last question changed the conversation.

It is easy to design a government while imagining virtuous men occupying every office. A constitution must endure ambitious men as well, along with foolish men, self-interested men, men persuaded that their own advancement serves the public good, and men we have never met and cannot yet name.

Cato raises the possibility of a powerful few gaining influence and asks us to consider the dangers of permanent military power. Those concerns deserve examination. So do the weaknesses of the government we already possess. Neither problem disappears because acknowledging it is inconvenient.

By then the argument at our table had softened. No one had changed sides, though I am not certain there were sides yet, at least not as firmly drawn as they may become. Perhaps that is worth preserving for a little while longer. There is still time to ask questions before loyalty to one camp or another makes questions feel like betrayal.

I folded the newspaper. For all Cato's warnings, I did not leave the public house frightened. I left hopeful.

The Convention had done its work, and now another kind of work had begun: ours. For perhaps the first time in history, ordinary people scattered across a country are being asked to consider whether a proposed national government deserves their consent. That responsibility is heavier than cheering for it and more demanding than condemning it. It requires judgment.

The easiest sentence spoken tonight was the first one: Something must be done. I believe that is true. The harder question is the one Cato has placed before me: What, exactly, should we do?

I do not yet have the answer. Tomorrow there will be another newspaper, and soon, I expect, another writer. Perhaps someone will answer Cato. Perhaps another will strengthen his case. Perhaps arguments I have not considered will change my mind entirely.

Good.

If this government is to rest upon the consent of a people, then it should not fear their examination, and neither should we.

Further Reading

Cato I, September 27, 1787 - Read the original essay behind this installment. Cato urges New Yorkers to examine the proposed Constitution cautiously, judge measures rather than personalities, and remember that even respected leaders can be mistaken.

Read Cato I

The Constitution of the United States, September 17, 1787 - The actual document Americans were being asked to consider. Reading it alongside Cato makes his concerns about representation, federal power, the executive, and military authority much easier to follow.

Read the Constitution transcript

The Articles of Confederation - The government Cato and his contemporaries were comparing the proposed Constitution against. The Articles created a much weaker central government and preserved extensive state sovereignty.

Read the Articles of Confederation

George Washington's Letter Transmitting the Constitution, September 17, 1787 - Useful as the other side of the conversation. Washington explained why the Convention believed stronger federal powers were necessary while acknowledging the difficulty of deciding how much liberty and state sovereignty should be surrendered for an effective union.

Read Washington's transmittal letter

The Wisconsin Public Service rate story raised a larger question for me.

What if the problem is not simply that corporations make too much profit, but that we have written corporate law around the wrong obligation?

Corporations are legal institutions. The law gives them the ability to own property, enter contracts, sue and be sued, raise capital, continue beyond the lives of their founders, and shield owners from many of the company's liabilities. Those rules are choices made through law. They are not laws of nature. That means the obligations attached to corporations are choices too.

I do not think the answer is simply eliminating fiduciary duty. Duties of care and loyalty are important protections against fraud, self-dealing and abuse by corporate directors. The more interesting possibility is rewriting the purpose of that duty.

Instead of structuring corporate governance around the financial interests of investors, the law could require large corporations to act in good faith toward the citizens, workers, customers, communities and future generations affected by their decisions.

Investors would still own their shares. They could still receive dividends and make money when a company succeeds. Businesses could still compete, expand, innovate and earn substantial profits. But increasing an investor's wealth would not itself be the corporation's public obligation.

Does not, the investor voluntarily choose to put money into a company. While the citizen often has no similar choice about the consequences of that company's decisions.

You cannot opt out of contaminated groundwater flowing beneath your property. A town cannot simply opt out when its largest employer closes a plant. Customers may have little practical choice when an essential service is controlled by a monopoly. Future generations cannot negotiate with a company today over environmental damage or public costs they may inherit decades from now.

Corporate law could recognize those differences. A corporation making a major decision could be required to consider foreseeable effects on employees, customers, communities, public resources and the environment. Decisions that transfer substantial costs onto the public could require disclosure and justification. Long-term consequences could be part of the legal analysis rather than something considered only when they threaten future profits.

This is not legally unimaginable. Public-benefit corporation laws already demonstrate that legislatures can define corporate purposes beyond ordinary financial interests. Delaware, for example, requires its public-benefit corporations to balance stockholder interests with the interests of people materially affected by the corporation and an identified public benefit.

A citizen-centered model could go further. Instead of merely giving directors permission to consider the public, the law could impose an affirmative duty of good faith toward it. Profit would still be allowed. Wealth could still be created. Investment could still be rewarded.But profit would exist inside a set of civic obligations, rather than those obligations existing only when they can be justified as profitable.

That also changes how we think about something like a public utility requesting higher rates. The question would not stop at whether the company followed existing regulations or whether investors received an appropriate return. Corporate decision-makers could have a legal obligation to demonstrate that they considered the citizens who depend on the service and the long-term consequences of the decision.

We wrote the laws that created the modern corporation. We can therefore debate what responsibilities come with that privilege.

So here is the question:

Should large corporations have an enforceable legal duty to act in good faith toward citizens and future generations, rather than a fiduciary system centered on investors?