The New Jersey plan certainly would not produce this effect. It merely granted the regulation of trade and a more effectual collection of the revenue, and some partial duties, which, at five or ten per cent, would perhaps only amount to a fund to discharge the debt of the corporation. But there were a variety of objects which must necessarily engage the attention of a national government. It would have to protect our rights against Canada on the north, against Spain on the south, and the western frontier against the savages. It would have to adopt necessary plans for the settlement of the frontiers, and to institute the mode in which settlements and good governments were to be made. According to the New Jersey plan, the expense of supporting and regulating these important matters could only be defrayed by requisitions. This mode had already proved, and would always be found, ineffectual. The national revenue must be drawn from commerce,--from imposts, taxes on specific articles, and even from exports, which, notwithstanding the common opinion, he held to be fit objects of moderate taxation. The radical objections to the New Jersey plan he held to be its equality of suffrage as between the States; its incapacity to raise forces or to levy taxes; and the organization of Congress, which it proposed to leave unchanged. On the other hand, the great extent of the country to be governed, and the difficulty of drawing a suitable representation from such distances, led him to regard the Virginia plan with doubt and hesitation. At the same time, he declared that the system must be a representative and republican government. But representation alone, without the element of a permanent tenure of office in some part of the system, would not, as he believed, answer the purpose. For, as society naturally falls into the political divisions of the few and the many, or the majority and the minority, some part of every good representative government must be so constituted as to furnish a check to the mere democratic element. The Virginia plan, which proposed that both branches of the national legislature should be chosen by the people of the States, and that the executive should be appointed by the legislature, presented a democratic Assembly to be checked by a democratic Senate, and both of them by a democratic chief magistrate. To give a Senate or an executive thus chosen an official term a few years longer than that of the members of the Assembly, would not be sufficient to remove them from the violence and turbulence of the popular passions.