Page:Debates in the Several State Conventions, v5.djvu/449

1787.] Mr. WILLIAMSON introduced his opposition to the motion, by referring to the question concerning "money bills." That clause, he said, was dead. Its ghost, he was afraid, would, notwithstanding, haunt us. It had been a matter of conscience with him to insist on it as long as there was hope of retaining it. He had swallowed the vote of rejection with reluctance. He could not digest it. All that was said on the other side was, that the restriction was not convenient. We have now got a House of Lords which is to originate money bills. To avoid another inconvenience, we are to have a whole legislature at liberty to cut out offices for one another. He thought a self-denying ordinance for ourselves would be more proper. Bad as the Constitution has been made by expunging the restriction on the Senate concerning money bills, he did not wish to make it worse, by expunging the present section. He had scarcely seen a single corrupt measure in the legislature of North Carolina, which could not be traced up to office-hunting.

Mr. SHERMAN. The Constitution should lay as few temptations as possible in the way of those in power. Men of abilities will increase as the country grows more populous, and as the means of education are more diffused.

Mr. PINCKNEY. No state has rendered the members of the legislature ineligible to offices. In South Carolina, the judges are eligible into the legislature. It cannot be supposed, then, that the motion will be offensive to the people. If the state constitutions should be revised, he believed, restrictions of this sort would be rather diminished than multiplied.

Mr. WILSON could not approve of the section as it stood, and could not give up his judgment to any supposed objections that might arise among the people. He considered himself as acting and responsible for the welfare of millions not immediately represented in this House. He had also asked himself the serious question, what he should say to his constituents, in case they should call upon him to tell them why he sacrificed his own judgment in a case where they authorized him to exercise it. Were he to own to them that he sacrificed it in order to flatter their prejudices, he should dread the retort, "Did you suppose the people of Pennsylvania had not good sense enough to receive a good government?" Under this impression, he should certainly follow his own judgment, which disapproved of the section. He would remark, in addition to the objections urged against it, that, as one branch of the legislature was to be appointed by the legislatures of the states, the other by the people of the states,—as both are to be paid by the states, and to be appointable to state offices,—nothing seemed to be wanting to prostrate the national legislature, but to render its members ineligible to national offices, and by that means take away its power of attracting those talents which were necessary to give weight to the government, and to render it useful to the people. He was far from thinking the ambition which aspired to offices of dignity and trust an ignoble or culpable one. He