It was equally impracticable to form a national government in which the basis of representation should be confined to the free inhabitants of the States. The five States of Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, including their slaves, were found by the first census, taken three years after the formation of the Constitution, to contain a fraction less than one half of the whole population of the Union.[22] In three of those States the slaves were a little less than half, and in two of them they were more than half, as numerous as the whites.[23] There was no good reason, therefore,--except the theoretical one that a slave can have no actual voice in government, and consequently does not need to be represented,--why a class of States containing nearly half of the whole population of the confederacy should consent to exclude such large masses of their populations from the basis of representation, and thereby give to the free inhabitants of each of the other eight States a relatively larger share of legislative power than would fall to the free inhabitants of the States thus situated. The objection arising from the political and social condition of the slaves would have had great weight, and indeed ought to have been decisive of the question, if the object had been to efface the boundaries of the States, and to form a purely consolidated republic. But this purpose, if ever entertained at all, could not be followed by the framers of the Constitution. They found it indispensable to leave the States still in possession of their distinct political organizations, and of all the sovereignty not necessary to be conferred on the central power, which they were endeavoring to create by bringing the free people of these several communities into some national relations with each other. It became necessary, therefore, to regard the peculiar social condition of each of the States, and to construct a system of representation that would place the free inhabitants of each distinct State upon as near a footing of political equality with the free inhabitants of the other States as might, under such circumstances, be practicable. This could only be done by treating the slaves as an integral part of the population of the States in which they were found, and by assuming the population of the States as the true basis of their relative representation.