Page:Debates in the Several State Conventions, v4.djvu/426

410 increasing, and to throw this great advantage into the hands of other countries?

Let us examine the use or the benefit of the resolutions contained in the report. I call upon gentlemen to give me one single instance in which they can be of service. They are of no use to Congress. The powers of that body are already defined, and those powers cannot be amended, confirmed, or diminished, by ten thousand resolutions. Is not the first proposition of the report fully contained in the Constitution? Is not that the guide and rule of this legislature? A multiplicity of laws is reprobated in any society, and tends but to confound and to perplex. How strange would a law appear which was to confirm a law! and how much more strange must it appear for this body to pass resolutions to confirm the Constitution under which they sit! This is the case with others of the resolutions.

A gentleman from Maryland (Mr. STONE) very properly observed that the Union had received the different states with all their ill habits about them. This was one of these habits established long before the Constitution, and could not now be remedied. He begged Congress to reflect on the number on the continent who were opposed to this Constitution, and on the number which yet remained in the Southern States. The violation of this compact they would seize on with avidity; they would make a handle of it to cover their designs against the government; and many good federalists, who would be injured by the measure, would be induced to join them. His heart was truly federal, and it had always been so, and he wished those designs frustrated. He begged Congress to beware, before they went too far. He called on them to attend to the interest of two whole states, as well as to the memorials of a society of Quakers, who came forward to blow the trumpet of sedition, and to destroy that Constitution which they had not in the least contributed by personal service or supply to establish.

He seconded Mr. Tucker's motion.

Mr. SMITH (of South Carolina) said, the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. GERRY) had declared that it was the opinion of the select committee, of which he was a member, that the memorial from the Pennsylvania society required Congress to violate the Constitution. It was not less astonishing to see Dr. Franklin taking the lead in a business which looks so much like a persecution of the southern inhabitants, when he recollected the parable he had written some time ago, with a view of showing the impropriety of one set of men persecuting others for a difference of opinion. The parable was to this effect: "An old traveler, hungry and weary, applied to the patriarch Abraham for a night's lodging. In conversation, Abraham discovered that the stranger differed with him on religious points, and turned him out of doors. In the night, God appeared unto Abraham, and said. Where is the stranger? Abraham answered, I found that he did not worship the true God, and so I turned him out of doors. The Almighty thus rebuked the patriarch: Have I borne with him threescore and ten years, and couldst thou not bear with him one night?" Has not the Almighty, said Mr. Smith, borne with us for more than threescore years and ten? He has even made our country opulent, and shed the blessings of affluence and prosperity on our land, notwithstanding all its slaves; and must we now be ruined on account of the tender consciences of a few scrupulous individuals, who differ from us on this point?

Mr. BOUDINOT agreed with the general doctrines of Mr. S., but could not agree that the clause in the Constitution relating to the want of