The report of the committee of compromise still stood, therefore, but modified into the proposition of a fixed number for the first House of Representatives, and a rule to be compounded of the numbers and wealth of the States, to be applied by the legislature in adjusting the representation in future houses. A difficulty, apparently insuperable, had defeated the application of the simple and--as it might otherwise appropriately be called--the natural rule of numerical representation. The social and political condition of the slave, so totally unlike that of the freeman, presented a problem hitherto unknown in the voluntary construction of representative government. It was certainly true, that, by the law of the community in which he was found, and by his normal condition, he could have no voice in legislation. It was equally true, that he was no party to the establishment of any State constitution; that nobody proposed to make him a party to the Constitution of the United States, to confer upon him any rights or privileges under it, or to give to the Union any power to affect or influence his _status_ in a single particular. It was true also, that the condition in which he was held was looked upon with strong disapprobation and dislike by the people of several of the States, and it was not denied by some of the wisest and best of the Southern statesmen that it was a political and social evil.
Still, there were more than half a million of these people of the African race, distributed among five of the States, performing their labor, constituting their peasantry, and--if the numbers of laborers in a community form any just index of its wealth and importance--forming in each of those States a most important element in its relative magnitude and weight. It should be recollected, that the problem before the framers of the Constitution was, not how to create a system of representation for a single community possessing in all its parts the same social institutions, but how to create a system in which different communities of mere freemen and other different communities of freemen and slaves could be represented, in a limited government instituted for certain special objects, with a proper regard to the respective rights and interests of those communities, and to the magnitude of the stake which they would respectively have in the legislation by which all were to be affected.[101]