Page:Debates in the Several State Conventions, v2.djvu/392

376 places, in the gift of the United States, will establish an influence which will prevail in every part of the continent.

It has been admitted by an honorable gentleman from New York, (Mr. Hamilton,) that the state governments are necessary to secure the liberties of the people. He has urged several forcible reasons why they ought to be preserved under the new system; and he has treated the idea of the general and state governments being hostile to each other as chimerical. I am, however, firmly persuaded that an hostility between them will exist. This was a received opinion in the late Convention at Philadelphia. That honorable gentleman was then fully convinced that it would exist, and argued, with much decision and great plausibility, that the state governments ought to be subverted, at least so far as to leave them only corporate rights, and that, even in that situation, they would endanger the existence of the general government. But the honorable gentleman's reflections have probably induced him to correct that sentiment.

[Mr. Hamilton here interrupted Mr. Lansing, and contradicted, in the most positive terms, the charge of inconsistency included in the preceding observations. This produced a warm personal altercation between those gentlemen, which engrossed the remainder of the day.]

, June 30, 1788.—The personal dispute between Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Lansing was again brought forward, and occupied the attention of the committee for a considerable part of this day; on the termination of which, the debate upon Mr. Williams's motion was resumed, and continued by Mr. Williams, Mr. Smith, Mr. Jay, Mr. Jones, &c.

In the course of this debate, Mr. SMITH made the following remarks, in answer to Mr. Hamilton; that, though the gentleman's maxim was true, that the means should be adequate to the end, yet it did not, by any means, apply to a complex system like ours, in which all the objects of government were not to be answered by the national head, and which, therefore, ought not to possess all the means. In another view, he said, the rule would not apply. It was not true that the power which was charged with the common defence should have all the revenues. In the government of Great Britain, the power to whom the common defence was committed did not possess the means of providing for it. The king had the whole power of war; but the