That the final concession of this point was also a wise and fortunate determination, there can be no doubt. Those who made it probably did not foresee all its advantages, or comprehend all its manifold relations. They looked to it, in the first instance, as the means of securing the acceptance of the Constitution by all the States, and thus of preventing the evils of a partial confederacy. They probably did not at once anticipate the benefits to be derived from giving to a majority of the States a check upon the legislative power of a majority of the whole people of the United States. Complicated as this check is, it both recognizes and preserves the residuary sovereignty of the States; it enables them to hold the general government within its constitutional sphere of action; and it is in fact the only expedient that could have been successfully adopted, to preserve the State governments, and to avoid the otherwise inevitable alternative of conferring on the general government plenary legislative power upon all subjects. It is a part of the Constitution which it is vain to try by any standard of theory; for it was the result of a mere compromise of opposite theories and conflicting interests. Its best eulogium is to be found in its practical working, and in what it did to produce the acceptance of a constitution believed, at the time of its adoption, to have given an undue share of influence and power to the larger members of the confederacy.[112] NOTE ON THE POPULATION OF THE SLAVEHOLDING AND NON-SLAVEHOLDING STATES. Although, at the time of the formation of the Constitution, slavery had been expressly abolished in two of the States only (Massachusetts and New Hampshire), the framers of that instrument practically treated all but the five Southern States as if the institution had been already abolished within their limits, and counted all the colored persons therein, whether bond or free, as part of the free population; assuming that the eight Northern and Middle States would be free States, and that the five Southern States would continue to be slave States. This appears from the whole tenor of the debates, in which the line is constantly drawn, as between slaveholding and non-slaveholding States, so as to throw eight States upon the Northern and five upon the Southern side. I have found also, in a newspaper of that period (New York Daily Advertiser, February 5, 1788), the following "ESTIMATE OF THE POPULATION OF THE STATES MADE AND USED IN THE FEDERAL CONVENTION, ACCORDING TO THE MOST ACCURATE ACCOUNTS THEY COULD OBTAIN."