and in his opinion, but two, and these two great
divisions were the producing and the consuming
classes He knew of no other divisions which
did not war one upon the other. He knew no
go-betweens which could harmonize with either.
the merchant who bought to sell, bought from
the producer in order to make a profit by im-
posing a tax upon the consumer. He lived
upon the producer and upon the consumer both;
because it was his interest, it was the daily
business of his life to depress the price of the
producer's labor, in order that he might make
profit in the form of taxes upon the consumer.
This was his entire business morning, noon and
night. He thought of it by day and dreamed
of it by night. He had no other occupation,
When, therefore, the commercial power, situ-
ated as it always was in the larger cities, and
not in the agricultural districts, obtained all the
political power of a State, his life upon ft, the
producing classes would become hewers of
wood and drawers of water. He could imagine
that at no distant day Baltimore city might con-
tain as it had been predicted she would con-
lain, a population of some five or six hundred
thousand people. She was said to be the heart
of the body politic, but unlike the heart of the
body natural, when she got the blood to the
centre, she never sent it out again to the ex-
tremities. It remained there, and never re-
turned to give life and vigor to the whole sys-
tem,
He could suppose that this great commercial
power might have, in the course of time, the political
power of this State, and might control
and regulate all the laws of trade, and reverse all
those natural laws of trade, founded, in his judgement,
upon the true principles of political econ-
omy, by which the person who desired to buy was
made to go in search of the person who had to
sell, and adopt a principle by which the producer
of the raw material was forced to go in quest of
the capitalist, thereby placing the laws of trade
and the control of the market in the hands of the
commercial power. He could suppose such a
state of things to exist, and he would ask whether,
under such circumstances, it would not be of the
utmost importance to the agricultural portions of
the State, to have a peculiar representative in the
Senate of the United States? In that body, where
great commercial treaties were to be formed, by
which the surplus products of the country were
either to find a market in foreign countries, or to
rot upon our hands, he thought it a matter of
sufficient interest to become a question of State
policy, whether a prevision should not be engrafted
in the Constitution which should, in all time
to come, secure to the agricultural classes of the
State a thorough and distinct representation. He
held it to be their duty to provide that they shall
be so represented. He had no allusion to the
agriculturists of a particular section of the State:
he meant the agriculturists of all Maryland—
Western and Eastern, They should lake care of
it; it was their bounden duty to do it. Because
gentlemen felt some doubt upon the question of
constitutional power, a power which had been acquiesced
in for forty years, and which he thought |
he had shown was not antagonistical to the Constitution
of the United States, was it to he struck
down for ever? Were gentlemen unwilling to en-
graft this provision upon the Constitution, and
yet willing to leave it upon your statute book, as
a standing memorial of legislative encroachments
upon the Constitution of the United States? If
they would not consent to a repeal of the act of
1809, he could not discover what reasons they
could urge as a justification of their opposition to
the engrafting a similar provision in the Constitution
of the State, so far, at least, as the question
of constitutional power was concerned. Did gen-
tlemen suppose that the framers of the law of
1809 acted under the belief that they were merely
doing an act of courtesy when they passed it?
No; he had a better opinion of the men of those
days than to suppose that they would have vio-
lated their oaths of office by passing a law which
they believed at the time to be against the Consti-
tution of the United States. No, sir. They believed
it to be constitutional, or else they were
faithless to the trust reposed in them by passing
it. Political skeptics and hair-splitters, men who
cannot see the force of the position, that where
two things may stand upon the same platform in
harmony together, one need not be driven off, but
both permitted to remain, may raise doubts as to
the constitutionality of this provision—but he de-
fied human ingenuity, human intellect, to show
him where the conflict necessarily existed, and it
must be a case of necessary conflict, or else both
must be permitted to stand together.
The gentleman from Kent had supposed that
the Constitution or the United States intended
to enumerate all the qualifications of a Senator,
and had found it necessary to invoke to his aid
the common law maxim of "Expressio unius est
exclusio alterius;" but if the gentleman would
look to the ninth article of the amendments to
the Constitution of the United States, he would
find that he could not avail himself of the bene-
fit of this maxim, for it is there expressly de-
dared to have no applicability whatever to ques-
tions of constitutional law. The language of
the ninth amendment is: "The enumeration in
the Constitution of certain rights shall not be
construed to deny or disparage others retained
by the people." Whatever application, then,
this maxim had to the ordinary rules of con-
struction, it certainly had none when we were
called upon to construe the Constitution of the
United States, with reference to the powers of
the General Government, and the reserved
rights of the States.
In conclusion, Mr. B. said, he could not but
think that the States, in the exercise of their
reserved rights, had the power to establish Uni-
ted States senatorial districts; and, in his opin-
ion, the agricultural portions of the State should
unite to secure the benefits of such a provision
by engrafting it upon the constitution of the
State.
Mr. THOMAS said that it might be that what he
should say in vindication of his vote was stated,
during the debate on this subject which had oc-
curred during his absence, in much better form
than he would express himself now. If this article |
