The Grand Federal Convention (a.k.a. The Constitutional Convention) Washington Admits He is Human

The Grand Federal Convention began yesterday (That's when I meant to post, ah well...); General George Washington was nominated to preside over the convention. He accepted. Here is James Madison's account of what happened:

General Washington was accordingly unanimously elected by ballot, and conducted to the Chair by Mr. R. Morris and Mr. Rutlidge; from which in a very emphatic manner he thanked the Convention for the honor they had conferred on him, reminded them of the novelty of the scene of business in which he was to act, lamented his want of better qualifications, and claimed the indulgence of the House towards the involuntary errors which his inexperience might occasion.

Now there is something you don't hear from today's politicians, an admission that they are human and that they might make a mistake; or an apology when they do. It reminds me of the other George W, George W. Bush who could never admit he made a mistake, even during a presidential debate. That is what separates great men from the the lousy ones...

From: Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

On such fundamental issues - representation and consent, the nature of constitutions and of rights, the meaning of sovereignty - and in such basic ways, did the colonists probe and alter their inheritance of thought concerning liberty and its preservation. To conceive of legislative assemblies as mirrors of society and their voices as mechanically exact expressions of the people; to assume, and act upon assumption, that human rights exist above the law and stand as the measure of the law's validity; to understand constitutions to be ideal designs of government, and fixed, limiting definitions of its permissible sphere of action; and to consider the possibility that absolute sovereignty in government need not be the monopoly of a single all-engrossing agency but (imperium in imperio) the shared possession of several agencies each limited by the boundaries of the others but all-powerful within its own - to think in these ways, as Americans were doing before Independence, was to reconceive the fundamentals of government and of society's relation to government. (230)