Undoubtedly, Hamilton, as I have said, was in favor of bestowing upon the national government full _power_ to legislate upon all subjects; and to this extent, and in this sense, he proposed the abolition of the State governments. But any one who will attend carefully to the course of his argument,--imperfectly as it has been preserved,--will find that it embraces the following course of reasoning. All federal governments are weak and distracted. In order to avoid the evils incident to that form, the government of the American Union must be a national representative system. But no such system can be successful, in the actual situation of this country, unless it is endowed with all the principles and means of influence and power which are the proper supports of government. It must therefore be made completely sovereign, and State power, as a separate legislative authority, must be annihilated; otherwise, the States will be not only able, but will be constantly tempted, to exert their own authority against the authority of the nation. I have already expressed the opinion, that in this view of the subject, assuming that the States were not to be admitted to an equal representation as political corporations in any branch of the government,--as the framers and friends of the Virginia plan had thus far contended,--Hamilton was right. I believe that a constitution, in which the States had not been placed upon an equal footing in one branch of the legislative power, and under which the State sovereignties had been left as they were left by the system actually adopted, if it could have been ratified by all the States, could not have endured to our times. Yet the fortunate result of the mixed system that is embraced in the Constitution of the United States, is the product, not simply of either of the theories of a national or a federal government, but of a compromise between the two.