in States, soon appeared with their melancholy consequences--
universal languor, jealousies and rivalries of States, decline of
navigation and commerce, discouragement of necessary manufactures,
universal fall in the value of lands and their produce, contempt
of public and private faith, loss of consideration and credit with
foreign nations, and at length in discontents, animosities,
combinations, partial conventions, and insurrection, threatening
some great national calamity.

In this dangerous crisis the people of America were not abandoned
by their usual good sense, presence of mind, resolution, or
integrity. Measures were pursued to concert a plan to form a more
perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity,
provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and
secure the blessings of liberty. The public disquisitions,
discussions, and deliberations issued in the present happy
Constitution of Government.

Employed in the service of my country abroad during the whole
course of these transactions, I first saw the Constitution of the
United States in a foreign country. Irritated by no literary
altercation, animated by no public debate, heated by no party
animosity, I read it with great satisfaction, as the result of
good heads prompted by good hearts, as an experiment better
adapted to the genius, character, situation, and relations of this
nation and country than any which had ever been proposed or
suggested. In its general principles and great outlines it was
conformable to such a system of government as I had ever most
esteemed, and in some States, my own native State in particular,
had contributed to establish. Claiming a right of suffrage, in