Here was the first complete exposition of the doctrine of a loose construction for the wording of the Constitution. If that be correct reasoning, said the opposition, the Constitution may as well stop with the preamble, since there is no power under heaven which could not be exercised within its limits. It would mean the consolidation of all powers, and the practical extinction of local government. The attitude of the two sides in the debate may be shown by one illustration employed. Suppose the power to make a treaty or to raise an army had been omitted from the Constitution, asked the Hamiltonians, could the National Government in an emergency assume such rights from the preamble and the powers expressed? Must it hesitate and temporise while the blood of its citizens was being shed? Such an assumption of power, replied the strict interpreters, might be excusable in an emergency, but could be warranted as a practice only by an amendment to the Constitution made in the manner it prescribed. The present situation and the compelling force which had produced it were manifest when those who favoured giving the Union such implied powers as would make it effective pointed out many instances of implication of which Congress had already been guilty; such as accepting land for lighthouses, defining crimes under power to establish courts, and even creating corporations in the shape of the North-West and the South-West territories. One of these lesions of the written word, that which interpreted a clause so as to give the President power over removals from office, Madison himself had favoured. This first constitutional debate also outlined the geographical sectionalism which has penetrated and influenced every feature of American political as well as commercial and social life. The Northern and Middle States contained the cities, made up of the trading class, whose capital was chiefly in ready money. The capital of the rural dwellers of the South was in land and slaves, not easily converted into cash. The latter became the borrowing, the former the lending section. The spirit of unionism was engendered in the first by reason of their urban life, their commercial employment, and their frequent contact in business. The feeling of individualism was as naturally bred in the latter by their rural surroundings, their agricultural occupation, and the self-reliance induced by their solitary environment. The opposition to the Constitution in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, and Pennsylvania had been confined almost entirely to the country. The rural States of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina did not adopt the new frame without a struggle. Georgia was a Southern exception; but population dwelt so exclusively along the coast in the new State of Georgia that it was really a commercial State, settled largely by New Englanders.