When the states had achieved their independence, they undertook to live together in the loosely formed union thus provided. They quickly found it impossible to do so. Not only was their central government powerless to fulfil its obligations to other countries, or to pay its debts at home, or to enforce its authority, or to levy and collect taxes, or to provide securely and properly for the maintenance of an army, a navy, a postal service or anything else of a national character or to do with certainty and authority any other of the things which a nation that expects respect may and must do, but it could not in any effective way regulate trade either with foreign countries or between the states. Each state had the reserved right to interfere with the transit of goods across its borders in ways that threatened presently to render trade among the states impossible. It was in view of these distressing conditions that the statesmen of Virginia appealed to those of the other states for a conference looking to the devising of a better way, "a more perfect Union." The conference thus called at Annapolis was attended by representatives from only five of the states. But it led to the calling of that Philadelphia Convention which, under Washington's presidency, and with the united wisdom of the most sagacious statesman in all the commonwealths, framed the Federal Constitution. The task was one of extraordinary difficulty. The old jealousies of the states remained in scarcely abated force. Each feared to surrender any part of its sovereignty. Each dreaded the possible interference of the others with its domestic concerns. Each feared and dreaded a national power that might some day control a state's actions and coerce it into an obedience derogatory to its sovereignty. The less populous states feared the possible dominance of the more populous, and all of them alike feared the possibly oppressive power of a national executive. After months of such labor as statesmen have rarely given to the framing of a fundamental law, all these differences were adjusted and in a considerable degree, though not wholly, the individual apprehensions of the several states were allayed. The equal representation of states as such, without reference to the numbers of their population, was provided for in the peculiar constitution of the Senate, in the organization of the electoral college which chooses the president and still again in the provision of the Constitution that in case of no election to the presidency the choice shall be left to the popular house of Congress, but with the express condition that each state's representatives in that body, however numerous or however few, shall have one and only one vote.