Yet the Philadelphia Convention itself, and the Continental Congress before it, and the various state constitutional conventions, had all acted as the hour required undeterred by any "little ill-timed scruples." In this the Convention, at least, displayed "a manly confidence" in the people, fortified by the knowledge that if the people approved their extraordinary actions "all antecedent errors and irregularities" would be blotted out. The "transcendent and precious right of the people to 'abolish or alter their governments'" first excused and then justified others in proposing how the people might best exercise that right (Madison [see ch. 6, no. 20]). But for Madison, no less than for Hamilton, the right called for more than popular self-expression. A people on the eve of revolution was surely a vexed people, but not every vexation was justification for revolt. Just as popular government sought to express "the cool and deliberate sense of the community" (see ch. 4, no. 27), so too ought popular resistance and revolution to express the settled desperation of people in extreme cases, not the pique of those who merely cannot have things their way (no. 14).
