The purpose of Ben Franklin's speech at the Constitutional Convention was to explain that he did not support the Constitution in its current state, but he was willing to wait and help better the document until he fully supported it.
Responses will vary. A sample response follows: Both the New Jersey plan and the Virginia Plan call for a stronger federal government. This, without a doubt, is why we are all here: a stronger federal government. Now, the ways in which we propose to go about this might be different between the two plans, but there are some similarities. Both discuss creating a Congress that is in charge of a chief executive. Perhaps most importantly, both discuss the need for a Supreme Court to be the final word on the law of our land. Surely these commonalities are a place for us to continue discussion.
John Locke (1632-1704) laid much of the groundwork for the Enlightenment and made central contributions to the development of liberalism. Trained in medicine, he was a key advocate of the empirical approaches of the Scientific Revolution
