These votes had been taken for the purpose of agreeing upon amendments to the original report of the compromise committee, which they would have so modified as to introduce into it, in place of a ratio of forty thousand inhabitants, including three fifths of the slaves, a fixed number of representatives for the first meeting of the legislature, distributed by estimate among the States, and for all subsequent meetings an apportionment by the legislature itself upon the combined principles of the wealth and numbers of inhabitants of the several States. But in order to understand the objections to the latter part of this proposition, and the modifications that were still to be made in it, it is necessary for us here to recur to that special interest which caused a new and most serious difficulty in the subject of representation, and which now began to be distinctly asserted by those whose duty it was to provide for it. There is no part of the history of the Constitution that more requires to be examined with a careful attention to facts, with an unprejudiced consideration of the purposes and motives of those who became the agents of its great compromises and compacts between sovereign States, and with an impartial survey of the difficulties with which they had to contend. Twice had the Convention affirmed the propriety of counting the slaves, if the States were to be represented according to the numbers of their inhabitants; and on the part of the slaveholding States there had hitherto been no dissatisfaction manifested with the old proportion of three fifths, originally proposed under the Confederation as a rule for including them in the basis of taxable property. But the idea was now advanced, that numbers of inhabitants were not a sufficient measure of the wealth of a State, and that, in adjusting a system of representation between such States as those of the American Union, regard should be had to their relative wealth, since those which were to be the most heavily taxed ought to have a proportionate influence in the government. Hence the plan of combining numbers and wealth in the rule. This was mainly an expedient to prevent the balance of power from passing to the Western from the Atlantic States.[96] It was supposed that the former might in progress of time have the larger amount of population; but that, as the latter would at the commencement of the government have the power in their own hands, they might deal out the right of representation to new States in such proportions as would be most for their own interests. Still there were grave objections to this combined rule of numbers and wealth as applied to the slaveholding States. In the first place, it was extremely vague; it left the question wholly undetermined whether the slaves were to be regarded as persons or as property, and therefore left that question to be settled by the legislature at every revision of the system. Moreover, although this