HKB
eradicated--Your general government cannot be just or equal upon the Virginia plan, unless you abolish state interests. If this cannot be done, you must go back to principles purely federal.
"On this latter ground, the state legislatures and their constituents will have no interests to pursue different from the general government, and both will be interested to support each other. Under these ideas can it be expected that the people can approve the Virginia plan? But it is said, the people, not the state legislatures, will be called upon for approbation--with an evident design to separate the interests of the governors from the governed. What must be the consequence? Anarchy and confusion. We lose the ideas of the powers with which we are intrusted. The legislatures must approve. By them it must, on your own plan, be laid before the people. How will such a government, over so many great states, operate. Wherever new settlements have been formed in large states, they immediately want to shake off their independency. Why? Because the government is too remote for their good. The people want it nearer home.
"The basis of all ancient and modern confederacies is the freedom and the independency of the states composing it. The states forming the amphictionic council were equal, though Lacedemon, one of the greatest states, attempted the exclusion of three of the lesser states from this right. The plan reported, it is true, only intends to diminish those rights, not to annihilate them--It was the ambition and power of the great Grecian states which at last ruined this respectable council. The states as societies are ever respectful. Has Holland or Switzerland ever complained of the equality of the states which compose their respective confederacies? Bern and Zurich are larger than the remaining eleven cantons--so of many of the states of Germany; and yet their governments are not complained of. Bern alone might usurp the whole power of the Helvetic confederacy, but she is contented still with being equal.
"The admission of the larger states into the confederation, on the principle of equality, is dangerous--But on the Virginia system it is ruinous and destructive. Still it is the true interest of all the states to confederate--It is their joint efforts which must protect and secure us from foreign danger, and give us peace and harmony at home.
"(Here Mr. Martin entered into a detail of the comparative powers of each state, and stated their probable weakness and strength.)
"At the beginning of our troubles with Great Britain, the smaller states were attempted to be cajoled to submit to the views of that nation, lest the larger states should usurp their rights. We then answered them--your present plan is slavery, which on the remote prospect of a distant evil, we will not submit to.
"I would rather confederate with any single state, than submit to the Virginia plan. But we are already confederated, and no power on earth can dissolve it but by the consent of all the contracting powers--and four states, on this floor, have already declared their opposition to annihilate it. Is the old confederation dissolved, because some of the states wish a new confederation?"--Yates, Secret Proceedings, etc., 177.
M^r Lansing & M^r Dayton moved to strike out "not," so that the 7 art. might read that the rights of suffrage in the 1^{st} branch ought to be according to the rule established by the Confederation."
M^r Dayton expressed great anxiety that the question might not be put till tomorrow; Govern^r Livingston being kept away by indisposition, and the representation of N. Jersey thereby suspended.