aits of the men and of the people behind them.

A prime necessity was willingness to make mutual concessions, together
with good judgment as to where those concessions must stop. Large States
against small States, seaport against farm, North against South and East
against West, slave society against free society--each must be willing
to give as well as to take, or the common cause was lost. The theorists,
too, must make their sacrifices; the believers in centralization, the
believers in diffusion of power; Madisonians, Hamiltonians,
Jeffersonians--all must concede something, or there could be no nation.
And between principles of moral right and wrong,--here, too, can there
be compromise? Easy to give a sweeping No; but when honest men's ideas
of right and wrong fundamentally differ, when personal ideals and social
utilities are in seeming contradiction, the answer may be no easy one.

The great difficulty at the outset, as to the relative power in Congress
of the large and small States, was settled at last by the happy
compromise of making the Senate representative of the States in
equality, and the House representative of the whole people alike. But
then came the question, Should the representation be based on numbers or
on wealth? The decision to count men and not dollars was a momentous
one; it told for democracy even more than the framers knew. But now
again, Shall this count of men include slaves? Slaves, who have no voice
in the government, and are as much the property of their owners as
horses and oxen? Yes, the slaves should be counted as men, in the
distribution of political power,--so said South Carolina and Georgia. In
that demand there disclosed itself what proved to be the most determined
and aggressive interest in the convention,--the slavery interest in the
two most southern States. Virginia, inspired and led by Washington,
Madison, and Mason, was unfriendly to the strengthening of the slave
power, and the border and central as well as the eastern States were
inclined the same way. But South Carolina and Georgia, united and
determined, had this powerful leverage; from the first dispute, their
representatives habitually declared that unless their demands were
granted their States would not join the Union. Now it had been agreed
that the Constitution should only become operative on the assent by
popular vote of nine of the thirteen States, and it was plain that at
the best there would be great difficulty in