The arguments against the combined principles of numbers and wealth, as a mere general direction to the legislature, and against their joint operation upon the contrasted interests of the Western and the Atlantic States, appear to have prevailed with some of the more prominent of the Northern members.[97] Accordingly, when a counter proposition was brought forward by Williamson,[98]--which contemplated a return to the principle of numbers alone, and was intended to provide for a periodical census of the free white inhabitants and of three fifths of all other persons, and that the representation should be regulated accordingly,--six States on a division of the question voted for a census of the free inhabitants, and four States recorded their votes against it.[99] This result brought the Convention to a direct vote upon the naked question whether the slaves should be included as persons, and in the proportion of three fifths, in the census for the future apportionment of representatives among the States. Massachusetts and Pennsylvania now, for the first time, separated themselves from Virginia. It was perceived that a system of representation by numbers would draw after it the necessity for an admission of the slaves into the enumeration, unless it were confined to the free inhabitants. On the one hand, the delegates of these two States had to look to the probable encouragement of the slave-trade, that would follow an admission of the blacks into the representation, and to the probable refusal of their constituents to sanction such an admission. On the other hand, they had to encounter the difficulty of arranging a just rule of popular representation between States which would have no slaves, or very few, and States which would have great numbers of persons in that condition, without giving to the latter class of States some weight in the government proportioned to the magnitude of their populations. But they would not directly admit the naked principle that a slave is to be placed in the same category with a freeman for the purpose of representation, when he has no voice in the appointment of the representative; and the proposition was rejected by their votes and those of four other States.[100] Thereupon the whole substitute of Mr. Williamson, which contemplated numerical representation in the place of the combined rule of numbers and wealth, was unanimously rejected.