Other
combinations, resulting from a difference of local position and policy,
must have created additional difficulties. As every State may be divided
into different districts, and its citizens into different classes, which
give birth to contending interests and local jealousies, so the
different parts of the United States are distinguished from each other
by a variety of circumstances, which produce a like effect on a larger
scale. And although this variety of interests, for reasons sufficiently
explained in a former paper, may have a salutary influence on the
administration of the government when formed, yet every one must be
sensible of the contrary influence, which must have been experienced in
the task of forming it.
Would it be wonderful if, under the pressure of all these difficulties,
the convention should have been forced into some deviations from that
artificial structure and regular symmetry which an abstract view of the
subject might lead an ingenious theorist to bestow on a Constitution
planned in his closet or in his imagination? The real wonder is that so
many difficulties should have been surmounted, and surmounted with a
unanimity almost as unprecedented as it must have been unexpected.
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