But the position of the Senate as an assembly of the States, and certain opinions of its superior fitness for the discharge of some of these duties, had united to make it far too powerful for a safe and satisfactory operation of the government. It was found to be impossible to adjust the whole machine to the quantity of power that had been given to one of its parts. It was eminently just and necessary that the States should have an equal and direct representation in some branch of the government; but that a majority of the States, containing a minority of the people, should possess a negative in the appointment of the executive, and in the question of peace or war, and the sole voice in the appointment of judges and ambassadors, was neither necessary nor proper. Theoretically, it might seem appropriate that a question of boundary between any two of the States represented in it should be committed to the Senate, as a court of the peers of the sovereign parties to the dispute; but practically, this would be a tribunal not well fitted to try a purely judicial question. It became necessary, therefore, to discover the true limit of that control which the nature of the representation in the Senate was to be allowed to give to a majority of the States. There had been some effort, in the progress of the controversy respecting the representative system, to confine the equal power of the States, in matters of legislation, to particular questions or occasions; but it had turned out to be impracticable thus to divide or limit the ordinary legislative authority of the same body. If the Senate, as an equal assembly of the States, was to legislate at all, it must legislate upon all subjects by the same rule and method of suffrage. But when the question presented itself as to the separate action of this assembly,--how far it should be invested with the appointment of other functionaries, how far it should control the relations of the country with foreign nations, how far it should partake both of executive and judicial powers,--it was much less difficult to draw the line, and to establish proper limits to the direct agency of the States. Those limits could not indeed be ascertained by the mere application of theoretical principles. They were to be found in the primary necessity for reposing greater powers in other departments, for adjusting the relations of the system by a wider distribution of authority, and for confiding more and more in the intelligence and virtue of the people; and therefore it is, that, in these as in other details of the Constitution, we are to look for the clew that is to give us the purpose and design, quite as much to the practical compromises which constantly took place between opposite interests, as to any triumph of any one of opposite theories.