Amid all the scrambling of private interests, perhaps only a few were capable of becoming founders and legislators who from their “commanding eminence … look down with contempt upon every mean or interested pursuit”; only a few were liberally educated and cosmopolitan enough to have the breadth of perspective to comprehend all the different interests of the society; and only a few were independent and unbiased enough to adjudicate among these different interests and advance the public rather than a private good.21 Determining who these few were was one of the crucial issues in the debate over
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