Page:Debates in the Several State Conventions, v2.djvu/159

.] paper currency, but by that part of them who now call themselves honest men. We have made exertions to stop the importation of foreign luxuries. Our brethren in the neighboring states, from the view of local advantages, have taken occasion to distress us upon the same account. They have encouraged where we have prohibited; and by those iniquitous measures have made our virtue and public spirit an additional cause of our calamity. Nor have our calamities been local; they have reached to all parts of the United States, and have produced dissipation and indigence at home, and contempt in foreign countries. On the one hand, the haughty Spaniard has deprived us of the navigation of the River Mississippi; on the other, the British nation are, by extravagant duties, ruining our fishery. Our sailors are enslaved by the pirates of Algiers. Our credit is reduced to so low an ebb, that American faith is a proverbial expression for perfidy, as Punic faith was among the Romans. Thus have we suffered every species of infamy abroad, and poverty at home. Such, in fact, have been our calamities, as are enough to convince the most skeptical among us of the want of a general government, in which energy and vigor should be established, and at the same time, the rights and liberties of the people preserved.

A Constitution hath been presented to us, which was composed and planned by men, who, in the council and field, have, in the most conspicuous offices, served their country in the late war. It comes authenticated by a man who, without any pecuniary reward, commanded our army, and who retired to a private station with more pleasure than he left it. I do not say, Mr. President, that this proves the form of government to be perfect, or that it is an unanswerable argument that we should adopt it; but it is a reason why we should examine it with care and caution, and that we ought not rashly and precipitately to reject it.

It will be objected, "There are more powers granted than are necessary, and that it tends to destroy the local governments of the particular states, and that it will eventually end either in aristocracy or despotism." To answer the objection, two considerations should be taken into view—the situation of the continent when a Constitution was formed, and the impossibility of preserving a perfect sovereignty in the states, after necessary powers were ceded to a