might have proved
as great as those under which we are now suffering. We were reduced to a
choice of evils; and though we chose blindly, it is by no means certain
that we did not choose wisely. As in all other cases, the judgment must
depend upon the event,--and the judges are gentlemen who sit in
courts-martial.

The manner in which the President and Vice-President of the United
States were chosen was the reverse of democratical. Each State had the
right to cast as many Electoral votes as it had Representatives in
Congress, which was a democratic arrangement up to a certain point; but
as a score and upward of the Representatives owed their existence to the
existence of Slavery, the equality of the arrangement was more apparent
than real. Yet farther in the direction of inequality: each State was
allowed two Electors who answered to its Senators, which placed New
Jersey on a footing with New York, Delaware with Pennsylvania, and
Florida with Ohio, in utter disregard of all democratic ideas. The
simple creation of Electoral Colleges was an anti-democratic proceeding.
The intention of the framers of the Constitution was that the Electors
of each State should be a perfectly independent body, and that they
should vote according to their own sense of duty. We know that they
never formed an independent body, and that they became at once mere
agents of parties. This failure was in part owing to a sort of
Chalcedonian blindness in the National Convention of 1787. That
convention should have placed the choice of Electors where it placed the
choice of Senators,--in the State legislatures. This would not have made
the Electors independent, but it would have worked as well as the plan
for choosing Senators, which has never been changed, and which it has
never been sought to change. The mode of choosing a President by the
National House of Representatives, when the people have failed to elect
one, is thoroughly anti-democratic. The voting is then by States, the
small States being equal to the great ones. Delaware then counts for as
much as New York, though Delaware has never had but one Representative,
and during one decennial term New York's Representatives numbered forty!
Twice in our history--in 1801 and in 1825--have Presidents been chosen
by the House of Representatives.

The manner in which it is provided that amendments to the Constitution
shall be effected amounts to a denial of the truth of what is considered
to be an Am