Page:Debates in the Several State Conventions, v5.djvu/236

210 of Mr. Patterson, not giving to the general councils any negative or the will of the particular states, left the door open for the like pernicious machinations among ourselves.

7. He begged the smaller states, which were most attached to Mr. Patterson's plan, to consider the situation in which it would leave them. In the first place, they would continue to bear the whole expense of maintaining their delegates in Congress. It ought not to be said that, if they were willing to bear this burden, no others had a right to complain. As far as it led the smaller states to forbear keeping up a representation, by which the public business was delayed, it was evidently a matter of common concern. An examination of the minutes of Congress would satisfy every one, that the public business had been frequently delayed by this cause; and that the states most frequently unrepresented in Congress were not the larger states. He reminded the Convention of another consequence of leaving on a small state the burden of maintaining a representation in Congress. During a considerable period of the war, one of the representatives of Delaware, in whom alone, before the signing of the Confederation, the entire vote of that state, and after that event one half of its vote, frequently resided, was a citizen and resident of Pennsylvania, and held an office in his own state incompatible with an appointment from it to Congress. During another period, the same state was represented by three delegates, two of whom were citizens of Pennsylvania, and the third a citizen of New Jersey. These expedients must have been intended to avoid the burden of supporting delegates from their own state. But whatever might have been the cause, was not, in effect, the vote of one state doubled, and the influence of another increased by it?$115$ In the second place, the coercion on which the efficacy of the plan depends can never be exerted but on themselves. The larger states will be impregnable, the smaller only can feel the vengeance of it. He illustrated the position by the history of the Amphictyonic confederates; and the ban of the German empire. It was the cobweb which could entangle the weak, but would be the sport of the strong.

8. He begged them to consider the situation in which they would remain, in case their pertinacious adherence to an inadmissible plan should prevent the adoption of any plan. The contemplation of such an event was painful; but it would be prudent to submit to the task of examining it at a distance, that the means of escaping it might be the more readily embraced. Let the union of the states be dissolved, and one of two consequences must happen. Either the states must remain individually independent and sovereign; or two or more confederacies must be formed among them. In the first event, would the small states be more secure against the ambition and power of their larger neighbors, than they would be under a general government pervading with equal energy every part of the empire, and having an equal interest in protecting every part against every other part? In the second, can the smaller expect that their