Page:Debates in the Several State Conventions, v5.djvu/239

1787.] men composing them, from whence a national character results to the whole. Congress can act alone without the states; they can act, (and their acts will be binding,) against the instructions of the states. If they declare war, war is de jure declared; captures made in pursuance of it are lawful; no acts of the states can vary the situation, or prevent the judicial consequences. If the states, therefore, retained some portion of their sovereignty, they had certainly divested themselves of essential portions of it. If they formed a confederacy in some respects, they formed a nation in others. The Convention could clearly deliberate on and propose any alterations that Congress could have done under the Federal Articles. And could not Congress propose, by virtue of the last article, a change in any article whatever,—and as well that relating to the equality of suffrage as any other? He made these remarks to obviate some scruples which had been expressed. He doubted much the practicability of annihilating the states; but thought that much of their power ought to be taken from them.$118$

Mr. MARTIN said, he considered that the separation from Great Britain placed the thirteen states in a state of nature towards each other; that they would have remained in that state till this time, but for the Confederation; that they entered into the Confederation on the footing of equality; that they met now to amend it, on the same footing; and that he could never accede to a plan that would introduce an inequality, and lay ten states at the mercy of Virginia, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania.

Mr. WILSON could not admit the doctrine that, when the colonies became independent of Great Britain, they became independent also of each other. He read the Declaration of Independence, observing thereon, that the United Colonies were declared to be free and independent states, and inferring, that they were independent, not individually but unitedly, and that they were confederated, as they were independent states.

Col. HAMILTON assented to the doctrine of Mr. Wilson. He denied the doctrine that the states were thrown into a state of nature. He was not yet prepared to admit the doctrine that the Confederacy could be dissolved by partial infractions of it. He admitted that the states met now on an equal footing, but could see no inference from that against concerting a change of the system in this particular. He took this occasion of observing, for the purpose of appeasing the fear of the small states, that two circumstances would render them secure under a national government in which they might lose the equality of rank which they now held: one was the local situation of the three largest states, Virginia, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. They were separated from each other by distance of place, and equally so by all the peculiarities which distinguish the interests of one state from those of another. No combination, therefore, could be dreaded. In the second place, as there was a gradation in the states, from Virginia, the largest, down to Delaware, the