“I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such;”
Benjamin Franklin wrote this statement for the final day of the Constitutional Convention, September 17, 1787. James Wilson read the speech aloud for him. Franklin had reservations about the proposed Constitution, but he urged the delegates to support the agreement they had reached. The selected clause preserves his uncertainty: the faults he perceived might not all be faults in fact. Its concluding semicolon belongs to a longer sentence about the country’s need for a general government. This is an argument for accepting an imperfect institutional settlement, rather than a declaration that the document was flawless or that every objection to it had been answered.
The qualification if they are such turns self-doubt into a public virtue. Franklin recalls that experience had led him to change opinions he once held confidently. He asks the delegates to leave room for the possibility that other people’s judgments may improve on their own. That request does not mean every proposal deserves equal confidence or that evidence should be ignored. It challenges the habit of treating personal conviction as sufficient proof. In a convention composed of people with competing interests and expectations, certainty could harden disagreement until no workable settlement remained. Franklin’s humility gives compromise a reason beyond fatigue or a desire to finish the meeting.
His speech also asks the delegates to consider the alternatives. A different convention might reproduce the same difficulties or create new ones. Institutions must be designed by people with their own prejudices, ambitions, and local attachments; the process cannot simply escape human imperfection. That argument helps explain his support for the proposed framework, but it does not erase the costs of particular compromises. The Constitution’s accommodation of slavery, among other contested arrangements, affected people who had no equal place in the convention’s deliberations. Readers should not turn Franklin’s appeal for agreement into a general rule that every bargain is morally acceptable. A practical settlement still requires examination of who benefits, who bears its burdens, and whose voice is missing.
The passage offers a careful way to think about political agreement. Supporting a proposal can coexist with identifying its weaknesses, provided the choice is grounded in reasons and remains open to correction. Public life frequently requires decisions before everyone has reached certainty. Franklin’s example asks participants to distinguish responsible judgment from an insistence on personal perfection as the price of cooperation. Yet compromise also needs standards. The willingness to doubt one’s own view should encourage serious review of objections, not silence the people harmed by an arrangement. The speech is most useful when its two demands are held together: examine a proposal honestly, and recognize that the limits of one’s own judgment may be part of the problem that shared deliberation must solve.
Franklin's written speech was read by James Wilson on September 17, 1787, at the close of the Constitutional Convention.
The quotation is part of his appeal to support the proposed Constitution despite reservations. He did not claim the document was perfect.
The qualification acknowledges that his own judgment might be mistaken. Franklin connects political cooperation with intellectual humility.
His practical case for agreement does not remove the need to examine the consequences of the convention's compromises, including accommodations of slavery.
The passage suggests that support and criticism can coexist. A decision can be reasoned and provisional without requiring absolute personal certainty.
Compromise needs both humility and standards. Participants should examine whose interests are represented and whose burdens an agreement creates.
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