Accordingly, the first expectation was that the government would deem itself under the necessity of disanulling the Convention; a necessity which, though in itself a great evil, appeared small in the eyes of judicious men, compared with the consequences of admitting that such a contract could be binding.

For they, who had signed and ratified it, had not only glaringly exceeded all power which could be supposed to be vested in them as holding a military office; but, in the exercise of political functions, they had framed ordinances which neither the government, nor the Nation, nor any Power on earth, could confer upon them a right to frame: therefore the contract was self-destroying from the beginning.

It is a wretched oversight, or a wilful abuse of terms still more wretched, to speak of the good faith of a Nation as being pledged to an act which was not a shattering of the edifice of justice, but a subversion of its foundations.

One man cannot sign away the faculty of reason in another; much less can one or two individuals do this for a whole people.
Therefore the contract was void, both from its injustice and its absurdity; and the party, with whom it was made, must have known it to be so.

It could not then but be expected by many that the government would reject it.