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bottom, he drew them out with his beak from their most secret hiding-places, and served them up as a regale for his ravenous appetite. The present federal government is, my fellow citizens, the log of the fable—the crane is the system now offered to your acceptance-I wish you not to remain under the government of the one, nor to become subjected to the tyranny of the other. If either of these events take place, it must arise from your being greatly deficient to yourselves-from your being, like the nation of Frogs," a discontented, variable race, weary of liberty and fond of change." At the same time I have no hesitation in declaring, that if the one or the other must be our fate, I think the harmless, inoffensive, though contemptible Log, infinitely to be preferred to the powerful, the efficient, but all-devouring Crane.

Baltimore, March 29, 1788.

LUTHER MARTIN.

LETTER

OF

A PLAIN DEALER

ACCREDITED TO

SPENCER ROANE,

AND PRINTED IN

THE VIRGINIA INDEPENDENT CHRONICLE,

FEBRUARY,

1788.

NOTE.

IN October, 1787, Governor Edmund Randolph, delegate to the Federal Convention form Virginia, addressed to the Speaker of the House of Delegates a letter on the Federal Constitution. This was published in December, 1787, in both The Virginia Gazette and The Virginia Independent Chronicle, as well as in pamphlet form at the time, and recently in Ford's Pamphlets on the Constitution. Randolph had declined to give his assent to the Constitution in the Convention, but had so far altered his views in the intervening period as to make his letter on the whole an argument in favor of rather than against its adoption. Uncertain in exactly what light to regard his utterances, it was one of the few writings of the time which did not receive replies from one party or the other.

The essay of "A Plain Dealer" is the only notice I have found of this letter, and deals rather more with the inconsistencies of Randolph's views, than with the arguments advanced in the latter. Of the author, Randolph himself gives us a clue in his letter to Madison, of February 29, 1788, where he writes:

A writer calling himself Plain Dealer, who is bitter in principle vs. the Constitution, has attacked me in the paper. I suspect the author to be Mr. Spencer Roane; and the importunities of some to me in public and private are designed to throw me unequivocally and without condition into the opposition.

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