A seat in the United States Senate had become a great honour, because it was a place of great power and great influence; and in passing from Albany to Washington Van Buren would add to state leadership an opportunity of becoming a national…

But the Bucktails had at last established a party organisation that could not be divided by Clinton intrigue, and Van Buren received the full party vote.

He did this work on a salary of three hundred dollars--only to receive, at last, in place of thanks so richly deserved, the unmerited rebuke of a summary dismissal.

The perfervid strength of his convictions as to the injustice of the Vice President's claim betrayed him into an intemperance of language that suggests over-zeal in a public official.

He had an indescribable refinement of face which seemed to come from the softness of the eye and the tenderness and intellectuality of the mouth, which reflected his gentle and generous spirit.

He had no wild ambition to be great, and cherished no thought of sitting in cabinets or controlling the policy of a great party; but his quiet, respectful manners and remarkable acuteness of mind attracted Van Buren.

But Talcott and his colleagues introduced new methods, with a higher standard of political morality, and a better system of party discipline.

They refused to tolerate unworthy men, and when the little souls stormed and raged, their wise counsels silenced the selfish and staggered the boss.

Gradually, the spirit that demanded independence, in 1776, began to insist upon a broader suffrage and additional rights.

The people of New York City, as well, who had increased over fifty per cent. in twelve years, clamoured for a radical change in conditions that seemed to them to have no application to life in a republic.

Following this suggestion, Governor Clinton, in his speech to the Legislature in November, 1820, recommended that the question be submitted to the people.

Governor Clinton preferred a convention of limited powers, a convention that could not abolish the judiciary or turn out of office the only friends left him.

Chancellor Kent, in giving his reasons for disapproving the measure, contended that the Legislature had no constitutional authority to create a convention of unlimited powers, and, if it did, it should require the convention to submit its…

It recalls the mistake of the historic conclave which elected a Pope whom the cardinals believed too feeble to have any will of his own, but who suddenly became their master.

Root and Young did more talking, but when others had argued until argument seemed hopeless, Van Buren usually spoke the last word with success.

The convention's work centred about three great principles--broader suffrage, enlarged local government, and a more popular judiciary system.

But, on the questions of suffrage and the judiciary, the convention was thrown into weeks of violent debate, memorable by prophecies never fulfilled, and by criticism that the future quickly disproved.

Again the advocates of universal suffrage favoured the proposition, and the friends of a freehold qualification opposed it; but this time the convention decided against the negro, thirty-three to seventy-one.

Nearly three-fourths of the voters of the State withheld it in 1846; and, six years after President Lincoln's emancipation proclamation, when the black soldier had served his country throughout the Civil War with a fidelity and courage…

The debate, however, which aroused the greatest interest, and in which members of the convention most generally participated, sprang from Ambrose Spencer's proposition limiting to freeholders the right to vote for senators.

That extreme democratic principle has been regarded with terror by the wise men of every age, because in every European republic, ancient and modern, in which it has been tried, it has terminated disastrously, and been productive of…

And dare we flatter ourselves that we are a peculiar people, who can run the career of history exempted from the passions which have disturbed and corrupted the rest of mankind?

It must be admitted, too, that the evils which he prophesied, if universal suffrage were given to New York City, have been too unhappily verified.

But, sir, am I on that account to indulge my individual resentment in the prostration of my private and political adversary?

The absence of violent democratic innovations was the Constitution's remarkable feature.