Direct taxes constitute the last resort; and, as might have been foreseen, would never be laid until other resources had failed."
This is a very imperfect, and, as it seems to me, not a very candid view of a grave and important subject. It would have been well to avoid it altogether, if it had been permitted; for the public mind needs no encouragement to dwell, with unpleasant reflections, upon the topics it suggests. In an examination of the Constitution of the United States, however, some notice of this peculiar feature of it was unavoidable; but we should not have expected the author to dismiss it with such criticism only as tends to show that it is unjust to his own peculiar part of the country. It is manifest to every one that the arrangement rests upon no particular principle, but is a mere compromise between conflicting interests and opinions. It is much to be regretted that it is not on all hands acquiesced in and approved, upon that ground; for no public necessity requires that it should be discussed, and it cannot now be changed without serious danger to the whole fabric. The people of the slave-holding States themselves have never shown a disposition to agitate the question at all, but, on the contrary, have generally sought to avoid it. It has, however, always "been complained of as a grievance," by the non-slaveholding States, and that too in language which leaves little doubt that a wish is very generally entertained to change it. A grave author, like Judge Story, who tells the people, as it were ex cathedra, that the thing is unjust in itself, will scarcely repress the dissatisfaction, which such an announcement, falling in with preconceived opinions, will create, by a simple recommendation to acquiesce in it as a compromise, tending upon the whole to good results. His remarks may render the public mind more unquiet than it now is; they can scarcely tranquillize or reconcile it. For myself, I am very far from wishing to bring the subject into serious discussion, with any view to change; but I cannot agree that an arrangement, obviously injurious to the South, should be [ *110 ]*held up as giving her advantages of which the North has reason to complain.
I will not pause to inquire whether the rule apportioning representatives according to numbers, which, after much contest, was finally adopted by the convention, be the correct one
