"A committee of one member from each State was chosen by ballot to take this part of the system under their consideration, and to endeavor to agree upon some report which should reconcile those States. To this committee also was referred the following proposition, which had been reported by the committee of detail, to wit: 'No Navigation Act shall be passed without the assent of two-thirds of the members present in each house;'--a proposition which the staple and commercial States were solicitous to retain, lest their commerce should be placed too much under the power of the Eastern States; but which these last States were as anxious to reject. This committee, of which also I had the honor to be a member, met, and took under their consideration the subjects committed to them. _I found the Eastern States, notwithstanding their aversion to slavery, were very willing to indulge the Southern States, at least with a temporary liberty to prosecute the slave-trade, provided the Southern States would in their turn gratify them, by laying no restriction on Navigation Acts_; and, after a very little time, the committee, by a great majority, agreed on a report, by which the general government was to be prohibited from preventing the importation of slaves for a limited time, and the restricted clause relative to Navigation Acts was to be omitted. "This report was adopted by a majority of the Convention, but not without considerable opposition." In the Virginia Convention, Mr. Madison said:-- "Mr. Chairman, I should conceive this clause to be impolitic, if it were one of those things which could be excluded without encountering greater evils. The Southern States would not have entered into the Union of America, without the temporary permission of that trade. And if they were excluded from the Union, the consequences might be dreadful to them and to us. We are not in a worse situation than before. That traffic is prohibited by our laws, and we may continue the prohibition. The Union in general is not in a worse situation. Under the articles of confederation, it might be continued for ever; but, by this clause, an end may be put to it after twenty years. There is, therefore, an amelioration of our circumstances. A tax may be laid in the meantime." In the North Carolina Convention, Mr. Spaight, one of the framers of the Constitution, said--