[64] Rhode Island was never represented in the Convention, and the delegation of New Hampshire had not yet attended.
[65] In all these statements of the relative rank of the States, I compare the census of 1790 and that of 1850.
[66] The two great exceptions of course were Hamilton and Jay.
[67] See the candid and moderate letter of Messrs. Yates and Lansing to the legislature of the State, giving their reasons for not signing the Constitution. (Elliot, I. 480.)
[68] In the New Jersey plan, which the New York gentlemen (Hamilton excepted) supported, although the power to levy duties and the regulation of commerce were to be added to the existing powers of the old Congress, yet as these powers were to be exerted against the States, in the last resort, by force, it would only have been necessary for a State to place itself in an attitude of resistance, by a public act, and then the grant of power might have been considered to be revoked by the very act of resisting its execution.
[69] Three of the delegates of the State, James McHenry, Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, and Daniel Carroll, signed the Constitution.
[72] Mr. Hallam has traced the present constitution of Parliament to the sanction of a statute in the 15th of Edward II. (1322), which he says recognizes it as already standing upon a custom of some length of time. Const. History, I. 5.
[73] Mr. Hallam does not concur in what he says has been a prevailing opinion, that Parliament was not divided into two houses at the first admission of the commons. That they did not sit in separate chambers proves nothing; for one body may have sat at the end of Westminster Hall, and the other at the opposite end. But he thinks that they were never intermingled in voting; and, in proof of this, he adduces the fact that their early grants to the King were separate, and imply distinct grantors, who did not intermeddle with each others' proceedings. He further shows, that in the 11th Edward I. the commons sat in one place and the lords in another; and that in the 8th Edward II. the commons presented a separate petition or complaint to the King, and the same thing occurred in 1 Edward III. He infers from the rolls of Parliament, that the houses were divided as they are at present in the 8th, 9th and 19th Edward II. (See the very valuable Chapter VIII., on the English Constitution, in Hallam's Middle Ages, III. 342.)