There are three important articles in Wilson's draught which are not Wilson's. These appear on the margin in the handwriting of Rutledge and answer to article XIV, XV and XVI of the Committee's draught. As they are in almost the precise language of Pinckney's articles 12 and 13 the much repeated question again arises, did Rutledge take them from the Pinckney draught; were they then in the Pinckney draught to be taken; or did Pinckney abstract them from the Committee's draught? The question is easily and decisively answered: _these articles are described in the Observations; Pinckney's title to them cannot be questioned; Wilson and Rutledge had his draught before them, and used it, when Rutledge wrote these articles upon the margin_.
The veto power was cast by the Convention in their resolutions with those of the Executive. Pinckney had placed it in his draught among the legislative, though he is careful to say in the Observations that the Executive "is not a branch of the Legislature farther than as a part of the council of revision." Nevertheless he placed the veto at the end of his article 5--an article relating to the choosing of members of the lower house; to the privileges of Representatives and Senators; to the business proceedings of both houses. Wilson more clearly perceived that the American veto would lack the finality of the _Le roy, avisera_ of the Crown, and that it would be neither a legislative nor an executive power though having the properties of both; and he properly made of the veto power an entire and independent article, article 7 of his draught. There were members of the Convention who regarded the veto power as a bulwark against the encroachments of the legislative power; and Wilson himself had said that, "the Executive ought to have an absolute negative"; that "without such a self-defence the Legislature can at any moment sink it into non-existence." Unquestionably the veto provision ought to have been placed in the Committee's draught as Wilson placed it in his own. But it was not. On the contrary it appears there as it appears in Pinckney's, as an incongruous paragraph at the end of an article which deals with the House of Representatives, with the business of both Houses and with the privileges of the members of each. The one thing certain here is absolutely certain--that the Committee in this did not follow Wilson's draught though it was correct and did follow some other draught though it was incorrect.