Page:Debates in the Several State Conventions, v5.djvu/443

1787.] in favorite measures, as well by withholding their negative as by adhering to a bill introduced by themselves.

Mr. MADISON thought, if the substitute offered by Mr. Randolph for the original section is to be adopted, it would be proper to allow the Senate at least so to amend as to diminish the sums to be raised. Why should they be restrained from checking the extravagance of the other House? One of the greatest evils incident lo republican government was the spirit of contention and faction. The proposed substitute, which in some respects lessened the objections against the section, had a contrary effect with respect to this particular. It laid a foundation for new difficulties and disputes between the two Houses The word revenue was ambiguous. In many acts, particularly in the regulation of trade, the object would be twofold. The raising of revenue would be one of them. How could it be determined which was the primary or predominant one; or whether it was necessary that revenue should be the sole object, in exclusion even of other incidental effects? When the contest was first opened with Great Britain, their power to regulate trade was admitted,—their power to raise revenue rejected. An accurate investigation of the subject after wards proved that no line could be drawn between the two cases. The words amend or alter form an equal source of doubt and altercation. When an obnoxious paragraph shall be sent down from the Senate to the House of Representatives, it will be called an origination under the name of an amendment. The Senate may actually couch extraneous matter under that name. In these cases, the question will turn on the degree of connection between the matter and object of the bill, and the alteration or amendment offered to it. Can there be a more fruitful source of dispute, or a kind of dispute more difficult to be settled? His apprehensions on this point were not conjectural. Disputes had actually flowed from this source in Virginia, where the Senate can originate no bill. The words, "so as to increase or diminish the sum to be raised," were liable to the same objections. In levying indirect taxes, which it seemed to be understood were to form the principal revenue of the new government, the sum to be raised would be increased or diminished by a variety of collateral circumstances influencing the consumption in general,—the consumption of foreign or of domestic articles,—of this or that particular species of articles,—and even by the mode of collection, which may be closely connected with the productiveness of a tax The friends of the section had argued its necessity from the permanency of the Senate. He could not see how this argument applied. The Senate was not more permanent now than in the form it bore in the original propositions of Mr. Randolph, and at the time when no objection whatever was hinted against its originating money bills. Or if, in consequence of a loss of the present question, a proportional vote in the Senate should be reinstated, as has been urged as the indemnification, the permanency of the Senate will remain the same. If the right to originate be vested exclusively in the House of 53