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WRITINGS OF SAM HOUSTON, 1858
where there was no census taken. You might, on the same prin- ciple, count the trees standing on thirty thousand squar~ miles in other States, and ask that they might be represented. We are not told that there is a solitary inhabitant living upon those thirty thousand square miles; and yet that is brought forward as a suggestion to enforce on this body and on the country a fatal precedent. If you can give three members to a new State applying for admission because her constitution ask for it, might you not as well give thirty-three? If you can transcend the ratio of representation according to population, in the admission of new States, you can extend it ad libitum; there is no limit whatever. That is not all. Has Minnesota any peculiar claims to our sympathy for want of fair representation for her fraction? Not at all. Heretofore she has been represented by a single Dele- gate in the other House, who had no vote. Now she comes into the Union with two Senators and a Representative, who is allowed a vote. Heretofore she has been powerless in both branches of Congress; and now she comes forward with equal power to any other State in the Senate, and a fair representa- tion for all that she has a right to claim in the other House. There is no peculiar claim, then, to our sympathy. She is fairly represented, and she is infinitely benefited by allowing her one member, because, instead of one Delegate to represent her vast interests and her growing population, she will have two full- blown Senators, and one Representative. It seems to me that an attempt is being made to misapply our sympathies on this subject. We must come down to some practical standard; and, in my estimation, we must measure our action by the law and by the Constitution. Each State is en- titled at least to one Representative and to two Senators. The Constitution does not confine a State to two Senators. It says that a State must have that number; but it does not say that it cannot have three, or four, or five Senators. It says that each State shall be represented by two Senators, and that each Sen- ator shall have one vote; but it does not say that a State shall not have a dozen Senators. If you go on construing the Consti- tution, and suiting it to every emergency, without regulating emergencies by the Constitution, you will have no limits or bounds to your legislation. I cannot think for a moment that Minnesota has any claim to more than one Representative; I cannot regard her constitution as the programme that is to regulate the action of both Houses of Congress. The idea of
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