222 ANDREW JACKSON 



prised between the Alleghany Mountains and the Mis- 

 sissippi River, the country which the superb diplomacy 

 of Adams and Jay had secured for us in the treaty of 

 1 783, that was for Gouverneur Morris nothing but back- 

 woods. He wanted to have the Constitution so framed 

 that this region should forever be kept subordinate to 

 the Atlantic States. It would never do, he said, to 

 intrust too much legislative power to illiterate back- 

 country people ; it needed the wisdom that is found in 

 cities; and in polite society to hold them in check and 

 prevent them from filling the statute book with absurd 

 and dangerous laws. It was gravely to be feared that 

 the population of the Mississippi Valley might by and 

 by come to exceed that of the Atlantic coast ; and ac- 

 cordingly this descendant of New York patroons desired 

 that some provision should be made by which in such 

 an event the minority might rule. It does not seem 

 to have occurred to him that, when the dreaded day 

 should arrive, this back-country people would occupy 

 a central position and have great cities and polite 

 society of their own, with views as much entitled to 

 consideration as anybody's. 



These suggestions of Gouverneur Morris were too 

 impracticable to meet with much favour in the con- 

 vention, but the feeling which prompted them was 

 common enough at that time and is not yet quite 

 extinct It is only by slow degrees that the American 

 people have outgrown this old aristocratic notion that 

 political power ought to be confined to certain groups 

 or classes of persons who, for one reason or another, 

 are supposed to be best fitted to exercise it. The 

 Americans of 1787 were not so very unlike their Brit- 

 ish cousins in their way of looking at such matters, 



