interest, or the mercantile interest, or the manufacturing interest? Or, to speak in the fashionable language of the adversaries of the constitution, will it court the elevation of the "wealthy and the well-born," to the exclusion and debasement of all the rest of the society?
If this partiality is to be exerted in favour of those who are concerned in any particular description of industry or property, I presume it will readily be admitted, that the competition for it will lie between landed men and merchants. And I scruple not to affirm, that it is infinitely less likely that either of them should gain an ascendant in the national councils, than that the one or the other of them should predominate in all the local councils. The inference will be, that a conduct tending to give an undue preference to either, is much less to be dreaded from the former than from the latter.
The several states are in various degrees addicted to agriculture and commerce. In most, if not all of them, the first is predominant. In a few of them, however, the latter nearly divides its empire; and in most of them has a considerable share of influence. In proportion as either prevails, it will be conveyed into the national representation: and for the very reason, that this will be an emanation from a greater variety of interests, and in much more various proportions, than are to be found in any single state, it will be much less apt to espouse either of them, with a decided partiality, than the representation of any single state.
In a country consisting chiefly of the cultivators of land, where the rules of an equal representation obtain, the landed interest must, upon the whole, preponderate in the government. As long as this interest prevails in most of the state legislatures, so long it must maintain a correspondent superiority in the national senate, which will generally be a faithful copy of the majorities of those assemblies. It cannot therefore be presumed, that a sacrifice of the landed to the mercantile class, will ever be a favourite object of this branch of the federal legislature. In applying thus particularly to the senate a general observation suggested by the situation of the
