during good behavior; and this has been his offence against republicanism, with those who measure the character of a system by the frequency with which it admits of rotation in office. His accusers have failed to notice that he made his executive personally responsible for official misconduct, and provided that both he and the senators should be subject to impeachment and to removal from office. This was a wide departure from the principles of the English Constitution, and it constitutes a most important distinction between a republican and a monarchical system, when it is accompanied by the fact that the office of a ruler or legislator is attained, not by hereditary right, or the favor of the crown, but by the favor and choice of the people.

I have thus stated the principal points to which the inquiries of the reader should be directed in investigating the opinions of this great man, because I believe it to be unjust to impute to him any other than a sincere desire for the establishment and success of republican government. That he desired a strong government, that he was little disposed to dogmatize upon abstract theories of liberty, and that he trusted more to experience than to hypothesis, may be safely assumed. But that he ardently desired the success of that republican freedom which is founded on a perfect equality of rights among citizens, exclusive of hereditary distinctions, is as certain as that he labored earnestly throughout his life for the maxims, the doctrines, and the systems which he believed most likely to secure for it a fair trial and ultimate success. (See his description of his own opinions, when writing of himself as a third person in 1792; Works, VII. 52.)

That the system of government sketched by Hamilton was not received by many of those who listened to him with disapprobation on account of what has since been supposed its monarchical character we may safely assume, on the testimony of Dr. Johnson, of Connecticut, one of the most moderate men in the Convention. Contrasting the New Jersey and Virginia plans, he is reported (by Yates) to have said: "It appears to me that the Jersey plan has for its principal object the preservation of the state governments. So far it is a departure from the plan of Virginia, which, although it concentrates in a distinct national government, is not totally independent of that of the states. A gentleman from New York, with boldness and decision, proposed a system totally different from both; and although he has been praised by everybody, he has been supported by none." (Yates's Minutes, Elliot, I. 431.)

Even Luther Martin did not seem to regard the objects of what he called the monarchical party as being any worse, or more dangerous to liberty, than the projects of those whom he represented as aiming to obtain undue power and influence for their own states, and whom at the same time he acquitted of monarchical designs or a desire to abolish the state governments. The truth is that nobody had any improper purposes, or anything at heart but the liberties and happiness of the people of America. We are not to try the speculative views of men engaged in such discussions as these by the charges or complaints elicited in the heats of conflicting opinions and interests, inflamed by a zeal too warm to admit the possibility of its own error, or to perceive the wisdom and purity of an opponent.

CHAPTER XXII.

CONFLICT BETWEEN THE NATIONAL AND FEDERAL SYSTEMS.-DIVISION OF THE LEGISLATURE INTO TWO CHAMBERS.-DISAGREEMENT OF THE STATES ON THE REPRESENTATION IN THE TWO BRANCHES.-THREATENED DISSOLUTION OF THE UNION.

WE are now approaching a crisis in the action of the Convention, the history of which is full of instruction for all succeeding generations of the American people. We have witnessed the formation of a minority of the states, whose bond of connection was a common opposition to the establishment of what was regarded as a "national" government. The structure of this minority, as well as that of the majority to which they were opposed, the motives and purposes by which both were animated, and the results to which their conflicts finally led, are extremely important to be understood by the reader.

The relative rank of the different states in point of population at the time of the formation of the Constitution was materially different from what it is at the present day. Virginia, then the first state in the Union, is now the fourteenth. New York, now at the head of the scale, then ranked after North Carolina and Massachusetts, which occupied the third and fourth positions in the first census, and which now occupy respectively the fifteenth and seventh. South Carolina is now the twentieth state, and Maryland is the twenty-third. The population of Georgia is still larger than that of New Jersey, as it was in 1787.

Great inequalities existed, as they still exist, between the dif ferent members of the Confederacy, not only in the actual numbers of their inhabitants and their present wealth, but in their capacity and opportunity of growth. Virginia, with a population fourteen times as large, had a territorial extent of thirty times the size of Delaware. Pennsylvania had nearly seven times as many people as Rhode Island, and nearly forty times as much territory.

The state of Georgia numbered a little more than a third as many people, but her territory was nearly twelve times as large as the territory of Connecticut.

The four leading states, Virginia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Massachusetts, had an obvious motive for seeking the establishment of a government founded on a proportionate representation of their respective populations. The states of South Carolina and Georgia had generally acted with them in the formation of the Virginia plan, and these six states thus constituted the majority by which the principle of what was called a "national," in distinction from a "federal" government, had been steadily pressed to the conclusions arrived at in the committee of the whole, and now embraced in its report. All but two of them were certain to remain slaveholding states; but in the adoption of numbers as the basis of representative influence in the government they all had a common interest, which led them for the present to act together."

At the head of the minority, or the states which desired a government of federal equality, stood the state of New York, then the fifth state in the Union. She was represented by Alexander Hamilton, Robert Yates, and John Lansing, Junior. The two latter uniformly acted together, and of course controlled the vote of the state. Hamilton's vote being thus neutralized, his influence on the action of the Convention extended no further than the weight and importance attached to his arguments by those who listened to them.

Occupying at that period nearly a middle rank between the largest and the smallest of the states with respect to population, New York had not yet grasped, or even perceived, the wonderful elements of her future greatness. Her commerce was not inconsiderable, but it had hitherto been the disposition of those who ruled her counsels to retain its regulation in their own hands, and to subject it to no imposts in favor of the general interests of the Union. Most of her public men, also, held it to be impracti

1 Rhode Island was never represented in the Convention, and the delegation of New Hampshire had not yet attended.

In all these statements of the relative rank of the states I compare the census of 1790 and that of 1850.

The two great exceptions, of course, were Hamilton and Jay.

cable to establish a general government of sufficient energy to pervade every part of the United States, and to carry its appropriate benefits equally to all, without sacrificing the constitutional rights of the states to an extent that would ultimately prove to be dangerous to the liberties of their people. Their view of the subject was, that the uncontrolled powers and sovereignties of the states must be reserved; and that, consistently with the reservation of these, a mode might be devised of granting to the Confederacy the moneys arising from a general system of revenue, some power of regulating commerce and enforcing the observance of treaties, and other necessary matters of less moment. This was the opinion of Yates, the chief-justice of the state, who may be taken as a fair representative of the sentiments of a large part, if not of a majority, of its people at this time.' But neither he, nor any of those who concurred with him, succeeded in pointing out the mode in which the power to collect revenues, to regulate commerce, and to enforce the observance of treaties could be conferred on the Confederacy without impairing the sovereignties of the states. It does not appear whether this class of statesmen contemplated a grant of full and unrestrained power over these subjects to a federal government, or whether they designed only a qualified grant, capable of being recalled or controlled by the parties to the Confederacy, for reasons and upon occasions of which those parties were to judge. From the general course of their reasoning on the nature of a federal government, it might seem that the latter was their intention." It is not difficult to understand how these gentlemen may have supposed that an irrevocable grant of powers to a general government might be dangerous to the liberties of the people of the states, because such a grant

1 See the candid and moderate letter of Messrs. Yates and Lansing to the legislature of the state, giving their reasons for not signing the Constitution. Elliot, I. 480.

In the New Jersey plan, which the New York gentlemen (Hamilton excepted) supported, although the power to levy duties and the regulation of commerce were to be added to the existing powers of the old Congress, yet as these powers were to be exerted against the states, in the last resort, by force, it would only have been necessary for a state to place itself in an attitude of resistance by a public act, and then the grant of power might have been considered to be revoked by the very at of resisting its execution.

would involve a surrender of more or less of the original state sovereignties to a legislative body external to the state itself. But if they supposed that a grant of such powers could be made to a "federal" government, or a political league of the states, acting through a single body in the nature of a diet, and to be exercised when necessary by the combined military power of the whole, and yet be any less dangerous to liberty, it is difficult to appreciate their fears or to perceive the consistency of their plan. If the liberties of the people were any the less exposed under their system than under that of a "national" government, it must have been because their system was understood by them to involve only a qualified and revocable surrender of state sovereignty.

But however this may have been, there was undoubtedly a settled conviction on the part of the two delegates of New York who controlled the vote of the state in the Convention that they had not received the necessary authority from their own state to go beyond the principle of the Confederation; that it would be impracticable to establish a general government without impairing the state constitutions and endangering the liberties of the people; and that what they regarded as a "consolidated" government was not in the remotest degree within the contemplation of the legislature of New York when they were sent to take their seats in the Convention.

The same sentiments, with far greater zeal, with intense feeling and some acrimony, were held and acted upon by Luther Martin of Maryland, a very eminent lawyer, and at that time attorneygeneral of the state, who sometimes had it in his power, from the absence of his colleagues, to cast the vote of his state with the minority, and who generally divided it on all critical questions that touched the nature of the government. The state itself, with a population but a little less than that of New York, had no great reason to regard itself as peculiarly exposed to the dangers to be apprehended from combinations among the larger states to oppress the smaller; and it does not appear that these apprehensions were strongly felt by any of her representatives excepting Mr. Martin.'

Three of the delegates of the state, James McHenry, Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, and Daniel Carroll, signed the Constitution.