The narrowing effect of sectionalism and prejudice on the human mind is curiously illustrated by the remarkable fact that in the Convention debates it was assumed on both sides that the entire benefit of the protection of private property by the Commonwealth inured to its individual owners. West Virginia delegates, therefore, insisted that the rich automatically received a preponderant share in the blessings of government; for example, said they, ten Virginians each owning $20,000 of property receive in all $200,000 of protection, which is double the total benefit received by one hundred citizens owning $1,000 each; thus one group of ten men get twice as much aggregate benefit from the state as another group of a hundred men. Over and over again it was urged that government protection of property was principally for the benefit of the rich minority. According to this absurd theory, the State of Virginia had no interest in the preservation of the accumulated private property within its borders; and would not be damaged if its dwellings, furniture, barns, stock, crops, vehicles and vessels of every description were destroyed. The Virginia clerks, laborers and hired workers of every description would not suffer in such case by being deprived of employment; possibly they could subsist on air, ruins or radical doctrines. The lack of business training and of business conceptions among the exceptionally able men of that Convention, and the need of such training for the membership of similar bodies today is strongly brought to our attention by the circumstance that such foolish reasoning passed unchallenged. The fact that all property is of common utility; that it constitutes a vast store from which all, rich, poor and middling are alike supported; that the workman needs the factory at least as much as the proprietor, was not in the mind of the Convention; the probability that the destruction of the entire property of the ten rich men above referred to would injure the community at large even more than the owners was apparently not appreciated by the Virginia delegates in 1829 any more than it would be by the members of one of our aldermanic boards today.