It is probable, however, that the slaveholding States would at that time have agreed to the adoption of numbers as the basis of assessment, if the Northern and Eastern States could have consented to receive the slaves into the enumeration in a smaller ratio than their whole number. But it was insisted that they should be counted equally with the free laborers of the other States; and the result of this attempt to solve a complicated and abstruse question of political economy by a theoretical rule, determining that a slave, as a producer of wealth, stands upon a precise equality with a freeman performing the same species of labor, was, that the Congress of 1776 were driven to the adoption of land as a measure of wealth, instead of the more convenient and practicable rule of numbers.[104] But the Articles of Confederation had not been in operation for two years, when it was found that the system of obtaining supplies for the general treasury by assessing quotas upon the States according to an estimate of their relative wealth, represented by the value of their lands, was entirely impracticable; that the value of land must constantly be a source of contention and dissatisfaction between the States; and that, if the mode of defraying the expenses of the Union by requisitions were adhered to, some simpler rule must be adopted. Accordingly, in 1783 the Congress were compelled to return to the rule of numbers; and it was in the effort to agree upon the ratio in which the slaves should enter into that rule, that the proportion of three fifths was fixed upon, as a compromise of different views, in the amendment then proposed to the Articles of Confederation.[105]