On the one side, therefore, of what would have been, but for the great inequalities among the States, almost a purely speculative question, we find a strong determination, the result of an apparent necessity, to establish a government in which the democratic majority of the whole people of the United States should be the ruling power; and in which, so far as State influence was to be felt at all, it should be felt only in proportion to the relative numbers of the people composing each separate community. It was considered by those who embraced this side of the question, that, when the great States were asked to perpetuate the system of federal equality on which the Confederation had been founded, they were asked to submit to mere injustice, on account of an imaginary danger to their smaller confederates. They held it to be manifestly wrong, that a State fourteen times as large as Delaware should have only the same number of votes in the national legislature. Whether the States were now met as parties to a subsisting confederacy, under which they might be regarded in the same light as the individuals composing the social compact; or whether they were to be looked upon as so many aggregates of individuals for whose personal rights and interests provision was to be made, as if they composed a nation already united, it was believed by the majority that no safe and durable government could be formed, if the democratic element were to be excluded. Pure democracies had undoubtedly been attended with inconveniences. But how could peace and real freedom be preserved, under the republican form, if half a million of people dwelling in one political division of the country possessed only the same suffrage in the enactment of laws as sixty thousand people dwelling in another division? Leave out of view the theory which taught that the States alone, regarded as members of an existing compact, must be considered as the parties to the new system, as they had been to the old, and it would be found that the political equality of the free citizens of the United States could be made a source of that energy and strength so much needed and as yet so little known. With it was connected the idea and the practicability of legislation that would reach and control individuals. Without it, there could be only a system of coercion of the States, whose opposition would be invited, rather than repressed, upon all occasions of importance. Abandon the necessary principle of governing by a democratic majority, said George Mason, and if the government proceeds to taxation, the States will oppose its powers.[70]