representatives, in choosing and
instructing whom all have an equal voice. So when States are united in a
confederacy each State has the same relation to that government that
individuals have to each other in a single State. They are free and
equal, and none has a larger share of rights in the confederacy because
its people are more numerous, or because it is richer or more powerful,
than the rest. In such a confederacy it is not the individual citizen
who is to be represented, but the individual State. In such a
confederacy there would be the same representation for a State, say of
ten thousand inhabitants, as for one of fifty thousand. This, it was
maintained, preserved equality of suffrage in the equality of States;
while the representation of the individual citizens of the States would
be in reality inequality of suffrage, because the autonomy of the State
would be lost sight of. If in such a case it were asked what had become
of the rights which the majority of forty thousand had inherited from
nature, the answer was that those rights were preserved and represented
in the state government. The difficulty, nevertheless, remained: how to
reconcile in practice this doctrine of the equal rights of States, where
there might be a minority of persons, with the actual rights of the
whole people where, according to the underlying democratic doctrine, the
good of the whole must be decided by the larger number.

Those who proposed only to amend the old Articles of Confederation, and
opposed a new Constitution, objected that a government formed under such
a Constitution would be not a federal but a national government. Luther
Martin said, when he returned to Maryland, that the delegates "appeared
totally to have forgot the business for which we were sent.... We had
not been sent to form a government over the inhabitants of America
considered as individuals.... That the system of government we were
intrusted to prepare was a government over these thirteen States, but
that in our proceedings we adopted principles which would be right and
proper only on the supposition that there were no state governments at
all, but that all the inhabitants of this extensive continent were in
their individual capacity, without government, and in a state of
nature." He added that "in the whole system there was but one federal
feature, the appointment of the senators by the States in their
sovereign capacity, that is, by their legislatures, and the