Digital heart book

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In a day or two he was hard at work again fighting the last desperate
battle. The oppositionists had brought forward a new form of conditional
ratification, with a bill of rights prefixed, and amendments subjoined.
This, it would seem, was their proudest achievement, and, in a long and
adroit speech, Melancthon Smith announced it as their final decision.
That was at midday. Hamilton rose at once, and in one of the most
brilliant and comprehensive speeches he had yet made, demonstrated the
absurdity of conditional ratification, or the power of Congress to
indorse it. It was a close, legal, and constitutional argument, and with
the retorts of the anti-Federalists occupied two days, during which
Hamilton stood most of the time, alert, resourceful, master of every
point of the vast subject, to which he gave an almost embarrassing
simplicity. On the third day occurred his first signal triumph and the
confounding of Clinton: Melancthon Smith stood up and admitted that
Hamilton had convinced him of the impossibility of conditional
ratification.


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