3l6 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. five delegates assembled, in the summer of 1787, to revise the Articles of Confederation. But it was already apparent to the leading delegates that something besides patching was necessary, and the Convention speedily set about the work of preparing a new framework for a new National Government. Even a cursory study of the debates in the Convention shows with what reluctance the power of acting in any way directly upon the individual citizens was granted to the Federal Government. There was an ever present fear that the Federal Government — even its friends hesitated to call it National — would swallow up, or at least overshadow the States, and extinguish local inde- pendence. The feeling of many — I may say of very many — of the delegates was the same as that of one of our present historians : — " If the day should ever arrive (which God forbid !) when the people of the different parts of our country shall allow their local affairs to be admin- istered by prefects sent from Washington, and when the self-government of the States shall have been so far lost as that of the Departments of France, or even so far as that of the Counties of England, — on that day the pro- gressive political career of the American people will have come to an end, and the hopes that have been built upon it for the future happiness and prosperity of mankind will be wrecked forever."^ The work of the Convention was in a considerable degree a matter of compromise, or rather of a series of compromises. The power to regulate foreign and interstate commerce was secured for the National Government only by conceding to the Slave States a continuance of the slave trade for twenty years.^ Hamilton's suggestion that the National Government be given powers practically unlimited was received with extreme disapproval. The New Jersey plan, providing for a Confederacy, left the States with no essential curtailment of their sovereign power. The Vir- ginia Plan, while providing for a Union under a National Govern- ment, sought to clothe such government with power only in matters relating to the national peace and harmony.^ The Scheme of Government which was finally framed and adopted was briefly as follows : — 1 John Fiske, The Critical Period of American History, p. 238. 2 Curtis, Constitutional History of the United States (1889), Vol. I. p. 305. 8 See Report of the Committee of the Whole, reported to the Convention, June 13, 1787. given in Curtis, Constitutional Hist, of U. S., Vol. I. pp. 365, 366.
