# Benjamin Franklin — "doubt a little of his own infallibility" > [!quote] "I confess that there are several parts of this Constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them. For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that, the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others. […] On the whole, Sir, I cannot help expressing a wish that every member of the Convention, who may still have objections to it, would with me, on this occasion, doubt a little of his own infallibility, and to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument." > — Benjamin Franklin, prepared speech to the [[Constitutional Convention]], Philadelphia, September 17, 1787 ## Context The final day of the Convention. Franklin was 81, afflicted with gout and a kidney stone, and unable to deliver the speech himself; he handed it to his fellow Pennsylvania delegate James Wilson, who read it aloud. It was Franklin's longest speech of the Convention. The speech was formally addressed to the Convention's president, [[George Washington]], but its actual audience was three delegates who had announced they would not sign: [[Elbridge Gerry]] of Massachusetts, and Edmund Randolph and George Mason of Virginia. Franklin's argument was not that the document was good; it was that no assembly of fallible men convened again would produce better, and that unanimity in presenting it mattered more than any individual's remaining objection. The appeal failed on its immediate target. Gerry, Randolph and Mason still refused. Thirty-eight men signed thirty-nine names that afternoon — John Dickinson of Delaware, ill, had asked George Read to sign for him. The text is preserved in [[James Madison]]'s notes on the Convention, which were not published until 1840. ## Why this matters **It is the founding document of small-r republican epistemic humility.** Franklin's formulation — *I might be wrong; sign anyway; the alternative is nothing* — is the template for civic acceptance of imperfect compromise, and it is the precise inverse of the maximalist posture that treats any concession as betrayal. The KB tracks a politics organized around the impossibility of being wrong; this is the founding-era text that says the opposite, from the most famous American alive at the time. **It complicates the originalist claim.** [[Originalism]] treats the Convention's product as carrying a fixed, recoverable original meaning. The document's most celebrated endorsement is a man saying he does not approve of several parts of it, expects to change his mind about things, and is signing because he expects nothing better — not because he believes the text is correct. The signature was an act of political closure, not doctrinal assent; several signers said so explicitly on the floor. **It is frequently invoked and rarely finished.** The line is quoted across the spectrum as a call for humility. What usually gets dropped is the clause that follows it — *"and to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument"* — which is not a plea for open-mindedness in the abstract but a demand that the doubter act anyway, in public, on the record. ## Verification Verbatim as recorded in Madison's notes for Monday, September 17, 1787, reproduced by the National Park Service's day-by-day account of the Convention for Independence National Historical Park. The bracketed ellipsis marks the omission of the intervening paragraphs of the speech, not an alteration of the quoted text. Delivered by James Wilson on Franklin's behalf; the words are Franklin's. ## Related - [[Benjamin Franklin]] - [[Constitutional Convention]] - [[Constitution]] - [[Shays' Rebellion]] — the crisis that produced the Convention - [[Originalism]] - [[Quotes Hub]]