On the day following that on which Hamilton had addressed the committee, Mr. Madison entered into an elaborate examination of the plan proposed by the minority. The previous Congressional experience of this distinguished and sagacious man had well qualified him to detect the imperfections of a system calculated to perpetuate the evils under which the country had long suffered. His object now was to show that a Union founded on the principle of the Confederation, and containing no diminution of the existing powers of the States, could not accomplish even the principal objects of a general government. It would not, he observed, in the first place, prevent the States from violating, as they had all along violated, the obligations of treaties with foreign powers; for it left them as uncontrolled as they had always been. It would not restrain the States from encroaching on the federal authority, or prevent breaches of the federal articles. It would not secure that equality of privileges between the citizens of different States, and that impartial administration of justice, the want of which had threatened both the harmony and the peace of the Union. It would not secure the republican theory, which vested the right and the power of government in the majority; as the case of Massachusetts then demonstrated. It would not secure the Union against the influence of foreign powers over its members. Whatever might have been the case with ours, all former confederacies had exhibited the effects of intrigues practised upon them by other nations; and as the New Jersey plan gave to the general councils no negative on the will of the particular States, it left us exposed to the same pernicious machinations. He begged the smaller States, which had brought forward this plan, to consider in what position its adoption would leave them. They would be subject to the whole burden of maintaining their delegates in Congress. They and they alone would feel the power of coercion on which the efficacy of this plan depended, for the larger States would be too powerful for its exercise. On the other hand, if the obstinate adherence of the smaller States to an inadmissible system should prevent the adoption of any, the Union must be dissolved, and the States must remain individually independent and sovereign, or two or more new confederacies must be formed. In the first event, would the small States be more secure against the ambition and power of their larger neighbors, than they would be under a general government pervading with equal energy every part of the empire, and having an equal interest in protecting every part against every other part? In the second event, could the smaller States expect that their larger neighbors would unite with them on the principle of the present confederacy, or that they would exact less severe concessions than were proposed in the Virginia scheme?