" Discussions were to be conducted “without fondness for dispute or desire of victory.” Franklin taught his friends to push their ideas through suggestions and questions, and to use (or at least feign) naïve curiosity to avoid contradicting people in a manner that could give offense. “All expressions of positiveness in opinion or of direct contradiction,” he recalled, “were prohibited under small pecuniary penalties.” It was a style he would urge on the Constitutional Convention sixty years later. In "