The general principles on which the powers of the national legislature were to be regulated, were declared with a great degree of unanimity. That it ought to be invested with all the legislative powers belonging to the Congress of the Confederation was conceded by all. This was followed by the nearly unanimous declaration of a principle, which was intended as a general description of a class of powers that would require subsequent enumeration, namely, that the legislative power ought to embrace all cases to which the State legislatures were incompetent, or in which the harmony of the United States would be interrupted by the exercise of State legislation. But the committee also went much farther, and without discussion or dissent declared that there ought also to be a power to negative all laws passed by the several States contravening, in the opinion of the national legislature, the Articles of Union, or any treaties made under the authority of the Union.[28] The somewhat crude idea of making a negative on State legislation a legislative power of the national government, shows that the admirable discovery had not yet been made of exercising such a control through the judicial department. Without such a control lodged somewhere, the national prerogatives could not be defended, however extensive they might be in theory. There had been, as Mr. Madison well remarked, a constant tendency in the States to encroach on the federal authority, to violate national treaties, to infringe the rights and interests of each other, and to oppress the weaker party within their respective jurisdictions. The expedient that seemed at first to be the proper remedy, and, as was then supposed, the only one that could be employed as a substitute for force, was to give the general government a power similar to that which had been exercised over the legislation of the Colonies by the crown of England, before the Revolution; and there were some important members of the Convention who at this time thought that this power ought to be universal.[29] They considered it impracticable to draw a line between the cases proper and improper for the exercise of such a negative, and they argued from the correctness of the principle of such a power, that it ought to embrace all cases.