apparent than real.  Yet farther in the direction of inequality:  each State was allowed two Electors who answered to its Senators, which placed New Jersey on a footing with New York, Delaware with Pennsylvania, and Florida with Ohio, in utter disregard of all democratic ideas.  The simple creation of Electoral Colleges was an anti-democratic proceeding.  The intention of the framers of the Constitution was that the Electors of each State should be a perfectly independent body, and that they should vote according to their own sense of duty.  We know that they never formed an independent body, and that they became at once mere agents of parties.  This failure was in part owing to a sort of Chalcedonian blindness in the National Convention of 1787.  That convention should have placed the choice of Electors where it placed the choice of Senators,—­in the State legislatures.  This would not have made the Electors independent, but it would have worked as well as the plan for choosing Senators, which has never been changed, and which it has never been sought to change.  The mode of choosing a President by the National House of Representatives, when the people have failed to elect one, is thoroughly anti-democratic.  The voting is then by States, the small States being equal to the great ones.  Delaware then counts for as much as New York, though Delaware has never had but one Representative, and during one decennial term New York’s Representatives numbered forty!  Twice in our history—­in 1801 and in 1825—­have Presidents been chosen by the House of Representatives.

The manner in which it is provided that amendments to the Constitution shall be effected amounts to a denial of the truth of what is considered to be an American truism, namely, that the majority shall rule.  Two-thirds of both Houses of Congress, or two-thirds of the legislatures of the several States, must unite in the first instance, before amendments can be proposed, or a convention called in which to propose them.  If thus far effected, they must be ratified by three-fourths of the States, before they can be incorporated into the Constitution.  The process is as difficult as that which awaited the proposer of an amendment to the legislation of the Locrian lawgiver, who made his motion with a rope round his neck, with which he was strangled, if that motion was negatived.  The provisions of Article V. pay no more attention to the mere majority of the people than Napoleon III would pay to a request from the majority of Frenchmen to abdicate that imperial position which he won for himself, and which it is his firm purpose shall remain in his family.