Page:Debates in the Several State Conventions, v1.djvu/368

348 "16. That a republican constitution and its existing laws ought to be guarantied to each state by the United States.

"17. That provision ought to be made for the amendment of the articles of union whensoever it shall seem necessary.

"18. That the legislative, executive, and judiciary powers, within the several states, ought to be bound by oath to support the articles of the union.

"19. That the amendments which shall be offered to the Confederation by this Convention, ought, at a proper time or times, after the approbation of Congress, to be submitted to an assembly or assemblies, recommended by the legislatures, to be expressly chosen by the people, to consider and decide thereon."

These propositions, sir, were acceded to by a majority of the members of the committee—a system by which the large states were to have not only an inequality of suffrage in the first branch, but also the same inequality in the second branch, or Senate. However, it was not designed the second branch should consist of the same number as the first. It was proposed that the Senate should consist of twenty-eight members, formed on the following scale:—Virginia to send five, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts each four; South Carolina, North Carolina, Maryland, New York, and Connecticut, two each, and the states of New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Jersey, Delaware, and Georgia, each of them one. Upon this plan, the three large states, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, would have thirteen senators out of twenty-eight—almost one half of the whole number. Fifteen senators were to be a quorum to proceed to business; those three states would, therefore, have thirteen out of that quorum. Having this inequality in each branch of the legislature, it must be evident, sir, that they would make what laws they pleased, however injurious or disagreeable to the other states, and that they would always prevent the other states from making any laws, however necessary and proper, if not agreeable to the views of those three states. They were not only, sir, by this system, to have such an undue superiority in making laws and regulations for the Union, but to have the same superiority in the appointment of the President, the judges, and all other officers of government.

Hence these three states would, in reality, have the appointment of the President, judges, and all other officers. This President, and these judges, so appointed, we may be morally certain, would be citizens of one of those three states; and the President, as appointed by them, and a citizen of one of them, would espouse their interests and their views, when they came in competition with the views and interests of the other states. This President, so appointed by the three large states, and so unduly under their influence, was to have a negative upon every law that should be passed, which, if negatived by him, was not to take effect unless assented to by two thirds of each branch of the legislature—a provision which deprived ten states of even the faintest shadow of liberty; for if they, by a miraculous unanimity, having all their members present, should outvote the other three, and pass a law contrary to their wishes, those three large states need only procure the President to negative it, and thereby prevent a possibility of its ever taking effect, because the representatives of those three states would amount to much more than one third (almost one half) of the representatives in each branch. And, sir, this government so organized, with all this undue superiority in those three large states, was, as you see, to have a power of negativing the laws passed