get into the newspapers and disturb the public repose by premature
speculations. I know not whose paper it is, but there it is
[_throwing it down on the table_]. Let him who owns it, take it."

He then bowed, picked up his hat and left the room with such evidences
of annoyance that, like school-children, no delegate was willing to
admit the ownership of the paper.

The thought suggests itself: How different the result at Versailles and
Genoa might have been had there been the same reasonable provisions for
discussion and action uninfluenced by too premature public comment of
the day! In these days, when representative government has degenerated
into government by a fleeting public opinion, the price we pay for such
government by, for and of the Press, is too often the inability of
representatives to do what they deem wise and just.

At the close of the convention its records were committed into the
keeping of Washington, with instructions to "retain the journal and
other papers, subject to order of Congress, if ever formed under the
Constitution."

Even the journal consisted of little more than daily memoranda, from
which the minutes ought to have been, but never were, made; and these
fragmentary records of the proceedings of a convention which had been in
continuous session for nearly four months were never published until the
year 1819, or thirty-two years after the close of the convention. Thus,
the American people knew nothing of their greatest convention until a
generation later, and then only a few bones of the mastodon were
exhibited to their curious gaze.