The Republic of Virtue. F. H. Buckley

      So we got our Constitution. The debates along the way were filled with high drama and extended argument among an extraordinary group of politically astute leaders. But that isn’t to say they were all high-minded great men. “There is nothing less true,” said George Mason. “From [New England] there were knaves and fools and from the states southward of Virginia they were a parcel of coxcombs and from the middle states office hunters not a few.”⁷ It’s all the more striking, then, to see how often the delegates expressed their concerns about corruption, and some of the strongest voices for virtue came from the strangest places.

      When Mason spoke of the middle-state “office hunters,” he likely let his eye fall upon Benjamin Franklin from Pennsylvania. At the age of eighty-one, Franklin was the oldest person at the convention, and next to Washington he was the most famous, the author of Poor Richard’s Almanac and a member of the Royal Academy. As a politician and a diplomat he had first asked the British to expel the French from North America and then persuaded the French to kick the British out of the United States, a triumph unmatched in U.S. diplomatic history. He was the indispensable American as much as Washington was. And he had built a career by securing lucrative public positions for himself and his family, beginning with his appointment as postmaster of Philadelphia in 1737.

      The delegates may therefore have suspected that Franklin was less than sincere in his statements about the corrupting effects of payment for high office. In proposing that presidents should serve without pay, Franklin argued that men are moved by their passions for money and power, and that the worst candidates will seek office when the two are combined. The result would be British-style corruption, with vast numbers of placemen appointed to government office in reward for services to their party. “The struggles for [government places] are the true sources of all those factions which are perpetually dividing the [British] Nation, distracting its councils, hurrying sometimes into fruitless & mischievous wars, and often compelling a submission to dishonorable terms of peace.”⁸ It would be the same in America if the posts of honor became places of profit.

      When he finished speaking, there was silence among the delegates. Perhaps they were thinking of how effectively Franklin had sought profitable places himself, and how much he had enjoyed the salons of Paris. They may also have been recalling the services he had done for America and wondering if it might be a mistake to discourage people like Franklin from taking public office. Finally, Hamilton seconded the motion for an unpaid presidency. Few delegates had less sympathy for the proposal, but Hamilton did not want to see the older man embarrassed. No one wished to debate Franklin’s proposal, wrote Madison in his convention notes, yet “it was treated with great respect, but rather for the author of it, than from any apparent conviction of its expediency or practicability.”⁹ And so it went nowhere.

      Hamilton wasn’t particularly troubled by corruption, as we have seen, but if any delegate was more cynical still it was Gouverneur Morris. While the story that he owed his peg leg to a jump from a window to escape a jealous husband is probably apocryphal, we do know something of his many affairs, thanks to his candid diary.¹⁰ When he went to Paris on banking business, he quickly adapted to local customs and shared a mistress—the comtesse de Flahaut—with Talleyrand, the bishop of Autun. With a touch of envy, a French diplomat described Morris as a man “without morals and, if one believes his enemies, without principles.”¹¹

      At the convention, Morris was the master of the adroit suggestion, the strategic compromise, the art of the deal. Though he was present at the start, in mid-May, he left after a few days, returning only on July 2, and then he wasted no time in launching into a patronizing speech in favor of an aristocratic senate, composed only of those who could serve without pay. The “aristocratic interest” would then be set against the “popular interest,” so that the two would check and control each other. Morris hoped the delegates had “strength of mind eno’ . . . to look truth in the face” and acknowledge what really motivates people, rich and poor. “He did not hesitate therefore to say that loaves & fishes must bribe the Demagogues.”¹² In his brashness, Morris failed to take the measure of the delegates, and Madison was especially annoyed. On July 11, he admonished Morris for continually insisting on the “political depravity of men, and the necessity of checking one vice and interest” against another.¹³ Within a short time, however, the two had made up, and Morris persuaded Madison to support the idea of a popularly elected president in a system of checks and balances.

Filtering Virtue

      Up to this point, Madison had subscribed to a very different theory for restraining corruption. The voters, he thought, might be made to elect their betters through a process of filtration, an idea first proposed by David Hume. Madison would have read Hume’s essays as a student at Princeton and would have come across his “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth.” There, Hume proposed a highly artificial scheme of government that began with a division of Great Britain and Ireland into one hundred counties, and each of these into one hundred parishes, and then built up from there with county-town assemblies, county magistrates, and senators.¹⁴ Ordinary voters would elect local representatives, who in turn would elect a higher level of representatives, and so on up the ladder. At each rising level, the electors would presumably have better judgment than those who elected them, resulting in a superior set of representatives at the highest levels. The cream would rise to the top.

      Madison suggested this concept of filtration or refinement of representatives in “Vices of the Political System of the United States,” his essay on the defects of the Articles of Confederation. What he envisaged was “a process of elections” designed to ensure that the most senior places in government would be occupied by “the purest and noblest characters” in society.¹⁵ Such a system would “extract from the mass of the Society” those who “feel most strongly the proper motives to pursue the end of their appointment, and be most capable to devise the proper means of attaining it.” People like Washington, in short. People like Madison himself, come to think of it! And so he proposed a constitution in which the voters would directly elect the House of Representatives, which would then choose the Senate, and both bodies jointly would pick the president. At the convention he described this as a “policy of refining the popular appointments by successive filtrations.”¹⁶

      This process would be a remedy for the defects of democracy, argued Madison. Ordinary voters would have little information about candidates and wouldn’t know how to choose wisely. They could easily become pawns in the hands of a corrupt demagogue “veiling his selfish views under the professions of public good, and varnishing his sophistical arguments with the glowing colours of popular eloquence.” In addition, self-interest would blind people to the common good. Washington, himself the paragon of virtue, privately agreed that governments could not rely upon a disinterested citizenry, for as he wrote to Madison’s father, “the motives which predominate most in human affairs” are “self-love and self-interest.”¹⁷

      Many politicians since Madison have questioned whether the voters, unaided, choose well. After the 1994 Republican landslide, Rep. Barney Frank was asked what he thought of the election’s message to his fellow Democrats. “The voters,” he exploded. “They’re nothing to write home about either!” When the Framers looked at the American electorate of 1787, they also didn’t see much virtue. They saw the confederation falling apart through an “excess of democracy,” with its “turbulence and follies.”¹⁸ In George Mason’s view, “it would be as unnatural to refer the choice of a proper character for chief Magistrate to the people, as it would, to refer a trial of colours to a blind man.”¹⁹

      In parliamentary systems of government, the voters do not choose the chief magistrate. The voters in Britain do not elect the prime minister. Only the voters of the Maidenhead constituency have the privilege of voting for or against Theresa May. What makes her prime minister is the support of Conservative MPs in the House of Commons, and that’s a form of filtration. It might be a minimal kind of filtration, since the MPs who chose May have run for election as members of her party in modern media campaigns. But Madison wanted this type of parliamentary or congressional government for the United States.