Cato V, Part VIII: Public Money and Private Interests

Without necessarily faulting George Clinton for arriving at what doubtless seemed to him to be a very reasonable conclusion as to the proper ratio of constituents to representatives based on the information to which he had access, I would nevertheless ask any reader of Cato V to consider the following examples from the present day before affirming the cited passage of that selfsame text as a timeless pearl of faultless political wisdom. Because though Clinton’s affirmation in 1788 that increasing the number of delegates serving in a given legislature will necessarily decrease the ability of that body to be actively corrupted was – and is – reasonable enough on its own as a theory, there are certain things which have occurred since that time whose effects on the practice of politics the author of Cato V likely could not have predicted.

Take the case of contemporary Brazil as an example. The Federative Republic of Brazil, as it is known officially, is structured not at all unlike the United States of America, with a directly elected executive, a bicameral legislature, and a supreme court. The executive – i.e. the President – is elected via a two-round runoff vote, members of the Senate are elected three each via a plurality vote from one of twenty-seven districts, members of the Chamber of Deputies are selected via proportional vote from among the various Federal States, and the Justices of the Supreme Court are appointed by the President and approved by the Senate. As of 2019 there are eighty-one Senators and five hundred and thirty-one deputies in the Brazilian National Congress. With Brazil’s population sitting at slightly over two hundred and ten million, that works out to about two million five hundred thousand people per Senator and four hundred thousand people per Deputy.

Now, already this ratio of constituents to representatives would seem to exceed what Clinton thought was acceptable in 1788 by a substantial margin. Considering the vehemence with which he objected to the prospect of Representatives in Congress being elected from districts sized to encompass a mere thirty-thousand people, one can imagine that his head would have fairly exploded at the thought of a legislator representing ten times that number. Indeed, one can perhaps also reasonably conclude that the author of Cato V would have struggled to conceive of any nation reaching a population of one hundred million without fragmenting into its constituent parts. Born at a time when the British colonies which would at length become the United States of America contained slightly less than one million people, and writing at a time when this selfsame territory encompassed less than four million, Clinton’s imagination would naturally have been limited by both his own lived experience of population expansion and the means by which he believed it possible to sustain a cohesive national polity across vast distances and amidst large, distinct, and semi-autonomous political entities. Easy though it is to forget, the reason that countries like Brazil can function as such is because technology exists – and has existed – that permits the inhabitants thereof to believe that they are all members of the same integral socio-political community. While in 2019 this communications infrastructure might most often be thought to include television and social media, it has in the past also encompassed print media, radio, telephones, telegraphs, trains, and even permanent roads and bridges. As most of these inventions fall well outside the experience of George Clinton’s lifetime – with the exceptions of roads and print – it would have been only natural for someone in his position to conclude that there was a definite limit on the number of people which could be included within the borders of a single nation before it effectively ceased to be a cohesive nation at all.  

On its face, then, it would be hard to imagine Clinton reacting with anything other than horror and amazement at the continued existence of a country like Brazil, let alone to the knowledge that Brazil is presently about average for its population in terms of the size and composition of its various political institutions. And yet, having confronted the numbers which a great many modern republics – or else representative democracies – are forced to contend with when attending to the task of governance, he would surely have had no choice but to agree that such measures as have regularly been taken are both necessary and proper. Consider, by way of evidence, the theoretical state of the Brazilian House of Deputies if even the ratio to which Clinton objected in 1788 were applied. If, for a population of two hundred and ten million, each Deputy represented thirty thousand people, the lower house of the National Congress would have to contain at least seven thousand Deputies. Not only would this substantially exceed anything that George Clinton or his fellow Founders could likely have imagined, it would represent the largest legislative body in human history. By way of comparison, recall some of the numbers that Clinton may well have been contemplating as of the late 1780s. The United States of America, as aforementioned, contained just slightly less than four million people at that point in time. At a ratio of no more than one Representative for every thirty thousand – as described in the text of the proposed constitution – the lower house of Congress was set to contain a maximum of one hundred and thirty-three members. While the actual number ended up being substantially lower – due to certain districts containing more than thirty thousand people – this is the base figure that Clinton had to work with and the number upon which he could – and presumably did – fix his disdain.

One hundred and thirty-three Representatives, it seemed, were by his reckoning too few to adequately reflect the diversity of interest and opinion possessed by the contemporary inhabitants of the United States of America within the context of a national legislature. What ratio would he have preferred? While it’s hard to say exactly, a reasonably educated guess might but the figure at something like ten thousand per district rather than thirty thousand. This would have yielded a House of Representatives comprised of four hundred members, a number which compares quite reasonably to the contemporary British House of Commons and its five hundred and fifty-eight MPs. Granted – and as discussed at length thus far – the House of Commons as it existed in the late 1780s hardly represented a favorable basis of comparison for a truly representative electoral regime. But at the very least it did function. Widespread corruption notwithstanding, the five hundred and fifty-eight members of the lower house of Parliament managed to form governments, formulate and approve legislation, and conduct investigations without consistently devolving into an intractable patchwork of multifarious factions. By the standards of the 18^th century, in short, it was possible for five hundred and fifty-eight people representing half as many distinct communities to go into a room somewhere and come to some kind of workable agreement on the issues of the day. Having observed this fact, it would accordingly seem reasonable enough for some like George Clinton to arrive at the conclusion that a legislature comprised of one hundred and fifty fewer members should have been able to function equally well, if not better.

 That being said, four hundred, or even five hundred and fifty-eight, is a far cry from seven thousand. And though modern communications and transportation technology has, as aforementioned, allowed magnitudes more people here at the dawn of the 21^st century to cultivate a more cohesive sense of community than was conceivable at the end of the 18^th century, the interests that govern countries like Brazil have still not attempted to push the ratio of constituents to representatives much beyond what George Clinton could have observed in contemporary Great Britain. The Brazilian Constitution could most certainly be modified so that the House of Deputies contained the aforementioned seven thousand legislators. An amendment to that effect could be proposed, and approved, and adopted in fairly short order, with the Brazilian people standing to enjoy a more granular representation in the lower house of the National Congress than they do at present. In spite of it being both possible and potentially desirable, however, such a measure has never been attempted, or seemingly even contemplated, in Brazil or in any other comparably large representative democracy. Germany, with a population of eighty-three million hasn’t tried it, or France (sixty-seven million), or Italy (sixty-million), or the United Kingdom (sixty-seven million). More than likely this is because the governing interests in all of these countries – and the electorates, presumably – have independently concluded that legislatures above a certain size, regardless of the population they are intended to represent, simply aren’t a good idea. They aren’t manageable; they’re not efficient; they don’t function, in essence. The causes behind it are doubtless varied, but the evident validity of this conclusion is spoken to by how widely it is observed. Even India, a nation of over one billion people in 2019, maintains the membership of the lower house of its national legislature at a mere five hundred and forty-five. Rest assured this was not happened upon by chance; the governing interests in India came to the same realization as did their counterparts in other representative democracies. That is to say, notwithstanding actual population figures, there is a limit beyond which the size of a legislative assembly becomes a hindrance to its ability to perform its intended role. 

Being made to realize this practical truth of modern democratic organization – along with the aforementioned ability of modern communications technology to forge relatively cohesive political communities out of vast and disparate populations – would doubtless have altered no small portion of Clinton’s thinking on the subject of legislative representation. Sincere though he may have been in his assertion in 1788 that the people of the United States stood to be dangerously underrepresented in the version of Congress described in the text of the proposed constitution, it is exceedingly difficult to imagine that his sense of conviction would have long withstood exposure to the realities of 20^th and 21^st century representative democracy. The figures which generations of statesmen and legislators have since been forced to content with far exceed anything which he was likely prepared to imagine, let alone take into consideration when crafting a stable model of democratic governance. This isn’t to say it was wrong of him to even question the scheme of representative government modeled by the Framers in the text of the proposed constitution, or to postulate the existence of a relationship between legislative composition and legislative behavior. On the contrary, Clinton should be admired for his willingness to question what so many others quite easily accepted, and for the incisive manner in which he did so. That being said – and as the preceding and proceeding discussions hopefully make clear – the subject of democratic representation was far more complex than he was either aware or willing to admit. And this is not even to mention the much thornier subject of political corruption.

Or perhaps “corruption” is the wrong word for it. What Clinton seemed to fear was that the small number of representatives chosen by the American people to speak on their behalf in the lower house of Congress would be too few to resist being influenced by some outside force whose interests were at odds with the general public will. Increase the number of representatives, he avowed, and the likelihood of such an outcome fades in proportion. If this was a valid theory, of course, the largest legislatures would necessarily be the least prone to having their collective will captured or subverted. 

In point of fact, however, this is demonstrably not the case. Consider, by way of example, the aforementioned National Congress of the Federative Republic of Brazil. As mentioned above, the upper house of the same contains eighty-one Senators, the lower house just over five hundred and thirty Delegates. Combined, this cohort of six hundred and twelve legislators represents a figure nearly six times larger than that which caused George Clinton to object so aggressively in 1788 to the paltry size of the proposed United States Congress. If one hundred and fifty-nine was too few – being the maximum number of Senators and Representatives permitted under the terms of the proposed constitution at the time that Clinton was writing – surely the author of Cato V would have agreed that six hundred and twelve was at the very least adequate. Mayhap it was conceivable at the end of the 18^th century that a single individual or organization could, with the proper resources, sway enough legislators within a group of one hundred and fifty-nine to essentially turn the legislative process to their own personal ends. But surely it was not possible for same outcome to result from among over six hundred of the same? Surely no one could muster the means to influence that many people towards a single goal?

As recent history has proven, of course, someone could indeed. Following what initially appeared to be a fairly routine investigation into money laundering by Brazilian law enforcement authorities beginning in 2008, a series plea deals, confessions, and further inquiries conducted between 2014 and 2017 went on to reveal the existence of a massive criminal conspiracy involving Petrobras – the Brazilian national petroleum corporation – as many as nine major construction firms, and dozens of politicians and party functionaries from across the political spectrum. Essentially, some portion of the executive leadership of Petrobras had, for a number of years, engaged in a deliberate campaign of overbidding on construction contracts with the various firms in question – the conglomerate Odebrecht being chief among them – in exchange for sizable kickbacks. In order to ensure that these contracts were approved – and would, in future, continue to be approved – both Petrobras and the construction companies also made large sums of money available to the members of the Senate, the Chamber of Deputies, and the ruling Worker’s Party who were each of them responsible for proposing, lobbying for, and authorizing the same. According to reports compiled after the fact at the behest of Brazilian investigators, this cohort of public servants included at least twenty-nine sitting Senators, thirty-four sitting Deputies, and twenty-three mayors, former mayors, former ministers, or former members of the National Congress. Marcelo Odebrecht, former CEO of the eponymous construction firm, affirmed following his own arrest and conviction for bribery that control over an account containing 40 million Brazilian reals was also given to the office of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in 2010 and transferred to the control of his successor Dilma Rousseff at the beginning of the following year. In total, some 6.2 billion reals (US $2.5 billion) were found to have been misappropriated, about half of which has thus far been recovered.

Now, obviously Petrobras and the aforementioned construction firms did not succeed in paying off over half of the total membership of the Brazilian National Congress. That is to say, their attempts to take hold of the institutions of Brazil’s public administration for their mutual financial benefit did not involve buying the cooperation of a controlling majority of the national legislature. Of the aforementioned six hundred and twelve members of the National Congress, only sixty-three sitting lawmakers were named in official reports as having taken money from one of the relevant organizations. Far from representing fifty-one percent of the total, this figures stands only slightly above ten percent. As it turned out, however, Petrobras and the construction firms didn’t need to buy a majority in the National Congress to get what it was they wanted. They just needed the right people in the right places to go along with their plans at the right time. It was for this reason, among other public officials, that they specifically targeted President Da Silva and President Rousseff, the treasurer of the ruling Worker’s Party, and the President of the Chamber of Deputies. Whereas the aforementioned coterie of Senators, mayors, and ministers doubtless served to guide particular construction projects through the processes necessary to secure their final approval, these key individuals between them arguably held the power to either facilitate the entire scheme or choke it off altogether. By buying their cooperation, the relevant executives at Petrobras and the construction firms thereby guaranteed that their shady dealings would enjoy a gloss of legitimacy and that potential internal investigations would be discouraged at the highest level.

That fact that Petrobras is a public company assuredly also went some distance towards narrowing the number of officials whose cooperation needed to be purchased. Because company revenues – generated by the ongoing exploitation of Brazil’s petroleum resources – are technically the property of the Brazilian government, company expenditures connected to major infrastructure projects must in turn by approved by members of the same. If Petrobras needs to build a pipeline, for instance, or a refinery, or new shipping facilities, it can do so only once the relevant construction contracts has been approved by the National Assembly and the President. Because these kinds of projects are doubtless quite common, it accordingly follows that any given contract shouldn’t raise many eyebrows when presented to the relevant authorities. Having knowledge of this state of affairs, the aforementioned conspirators could thus quite easily slip their inflated bids into the normal flow of business between Petrobras and the Brazilian government without having to secure the cooperation of more than the absolute minimum number of public officials. Beyond this relatively small group of beneficiaries – i.e. a few key Deputies and Senators, the leader of the lower house, a party treasurer, and the President – everyone else involved in the aforementioned approval process could safely be relied upon to assume, absent proof to the contrary, that nothing out of the ordinary was actively taking place. They would be made to facilitate corruption without ever knowing or benefiting, their ability to prevent the same stymied by a carefully targeted application of resources and attention. 

To be fair, Petrobras as its currently exists almost certainly represents a species of corporate organization that someone like George Clinton would have struggled to conceive of at the time he penned Cato V in the waning months of 1788. As discussed at length – my God, at length – in a previous series, what corporations did exist in the Anglo-American world at the end of the 18^th century tended to be both limited in scope and possessed of fairly narrow practical authority. Essentially, they functioned to make up for the financial or resource deficiencies which served to prevent a given state or national government from engaging in this or that project or enterprise whose end result was thought to be of substantial benefit to the general public. Rather than raise taxes and allocate personnel for the purpose of repairing a road, say, or building a bridge, a government might instead cede some portion of its authority to a private organization by way of a charter in order to see the same end accomplished at a reduced rate or according to a more efficient timetable han it could have managed itself. Petrobras, to be sure, aligns more closely with this description of a corporation than most modern multinationals, the stated purpose of which has far more to do with increasing share value than generating some manner of demonstrable public benefit. But its sheer size and behavior would still seem to place it well beyond what someone like George Clinton was likely prepared to imagine.

The aforementioned Bank of North America was perhaps the closet corporate entity in terms of scope and purpose with which he might have been familiar. Its purpose was to facilitate government spending; its share releases were authorized according to a government-defined plan. But the Banks was still, at its heart, a private institution whose operating capital came from private sources. Petrobras, by comparison, is a fundamentally public entity, its majority shareholder – to the tune of 64% – being the government of Brazil and the revenue it generates being government property. Corporations on this model, while quite common today – from Petrobras, to Mexico’s Pemex, to Norway’s Equinor, to Saudi Arabia’s Aramco – were completely unknown to the likes of George Clinton, thereby necessarily limiting his ability to conceive of the means by which corruption might be facilitated completely within the sphere of government. The danger, as recent events in Brazil have made clear, lies not just with individuals or organizations exterior to government whose resources might permit them to compromise the same. It can also originate with entities that exist – quite intentionally – somewhere between the public and private spheres. Their mentality having been molded by the need to exist in the latter, they may in turn attempt to use their connection to the former to further their pursuit of profit at the expense of the public good. 

Cato V, Part VII: Bubbles, Bubbles Everywhere, and the Chancellor in the Clink

The saga of the South Sea Company is an exceptionally complex one, especially for those of us not intimately familiar with the subtleties of debt consolidation and interest rates. Government annuities were traded for stock, the value of stock was used to buy more stock, the purchase of stock by certain individuals was used to increase the overall price of existing stock, making it more desirable, leading to more purchases, and so on, and so forth, into a vortex of defaults and pyramid schemes from which few people emerged unscathed. Leaving these finer details to the side, however, the general thrust of the thing would seem to have been relatively straightforward. In 1711 the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, a man named Robert Harley (1661-1724), determined after a detailed examination of the national debt that the best way to refinance the nine million pound sum that was owed – a task which the Whig-controlled Bank of England was disinclined to perform for the Tory government of which Harley was a member – was to set up a joint-stock venture under the guise of a trading company whose prospective share value would entice people to give up their government annuities. Because the creation of such an entity would require the approval of a charter by a majority in Parliament, promises were accordingly made to the requisite MPs as to the benefits which would accrue as a result of their acquiescence. The South Sea Company, as it would be called, would enjoy the exclusive right to trade with South America and the Caribbean, a market whose overall value was second perhaps only to the East Indies within the realm of contemporary European mercantilism. As the company made money buying and selling such lucrative commodities as slaves and sugar, shareholders would enjoy both an increase in stock price and a healthy dividend whose overall value would potentially exceed the interest they otherwise stood to collect by holding on to the aforementioned government annuities. Granted, at the time of its creation the company was prevented from engaging in such a venture by the inevitable refusal of Spanish authorities to allow the citizen-merchants of its British rival from operating within its proprietary colonial market. But in point of fact this mattered very little. Whether or not the South Sea Company ever gained access to the trade routes over which it claimed dominion, its shareholders stood to claim a tremendous return on investment.

The value of company stock, it seemed, could be made to increase by any number of means that had nothing at all to do with its stated purpose. Such was the genius of Harley and his associates in Parliament; war between Spain and Britain, news of a victory over Spain, rumors of negotiations with Spain, or even news of Spanish war fatigue would all serve to increase share value based on the promise of British conquest of all or part of Spanish colonial America. Further share price increases could be expected whenever a particularly prominent individual – say, a member of the royal family – became a subscriber, or when stock was offered as a loan against the promise of future profits. This latter arrangement – by which the price of shares was deducted from a future potential increase in their value – was particular insidious in the way that it bound new subscribers to the success of the company as a whole. And presiding over all of this were Harley and his collaborators, collectively among the largest investors in South Sea Company stock and the architects of the entire scheme. Not only did they trade the annuities that they owned themselves for shares which they expected would gain tremendously in value, but they also used their knowledge of the timing of new share issues to purchase otherwise devalued annuities just before their value was about to increase. In consequence of these kinds of tactics, investments poured in over the course of the next nine years from members of the gentry, government ministers – one of whom, Treasurer of the Navy Richard Hampden (1674-1728), used twenty-five thousand pounds of government money to purchase shares on his behalf – and even the king’s mistress and their children. And while a tremendous portion of Britain’s previously unconsolidated debt was successfully traded to the South Sea Company in exchange for shares of equal stated value – thus significantly reducing the yearly interest to be paid out of the Treasury – the consequent frenzy of speculation resulted in the emergence of an exceptionally perilous environment wherein a sudden, unexplained dearth of shareholder confidence could serve to collapse a large portion of Britain’s economy.

Unsurprisingly, this is almost exactly what happened. The outward success of the South Sea Company having inspired a host of imitators – both in style and (lack of) substance – the British economy had become fairly flooded by 1720 with shares issued under the names of companies whose stated business models were alternately novel, outlandish, nonsensical, or even illegal. Parliament accordingly opened a series of investigations into these entities, with particular attention being paid to those whose business practises were demonstrably at odds with the stated terms of their charter. One of these, the Hollow Sword Blade Company – which had been founded in 1691 for the purpose of manufacturing hollow-ground rapiers but became an unlicensed bank after it was purchased by syndicate of businessmen in 1702 – was only spared scrutiny by the fact that it had itself been instrumental in helping to form the South Sea Company back in 1711. MPs who held South Sea stock consequently voted by a significant margin to forgo a formal investigation; at least one of them later received further shares from one of the Hollow Sword’s directors. In spite of these backstage machinations, however, regulation did ultimately result. Notwithstanding a handful of previously unauthorized companies whose directors were given the chance to exchange a one-time indemnity for a royal charter – mainly those having to do with shipping insurance – the Bubble Act (1720) made it illegal for any joint-stock company to operate under British jurisdiction without first being granted the sanction of Parliament. The subsequent nullification of reams of circulating stock ultimately proved to be something of a mixed blessing for the South Sea Company. In the short time, refocusing the attention of the public – still in something of speculating lather – on the originator of the frenzy helped propel its share price to a new peak of over eight hundred pounds as of June, 1720. In the long term, however, having their shares trade at such a high value even briefly proved to be fundamentally unsustainable.

The year 1720 was a very memorable one for both the South Sea Company and for Great Britain as a whole. In January, South Sea stock traded at one hundred and twenty-eight pounds; by May it had increased to five hundred; following the passage of the Bubble Act and a bit of damage control on the part of company agents this grew to seven hundred; by midsummer it rose to an astonishing one thousand and fifty. Such a meteoric rise in value was most assuredly a source of jubilation for shareholders, but it was also arguably a signal of market volatility. The share price having increased tenfold in only six months, it was doubtless becoming increasingly clear to a least some portion of the South Sea investors that their as-yet unredeemed personal wealth possessed little in the way of a solid foundation. Seeking to get out “while the getting was good,” as it were, some people began to sell. This resulted in a series of increasingly disastrous knock-on effects. As the share price began to dip, more people started to sell while the price was still relatively inflated. Those who had purchased on credit saw their ability to repay what they owed essentially evaporate, declared bankruptcy, and liquidated more stock to cover their debts. And as the falling value of South Sea stock produced shareholder anxiety in markets in Amsterdam and Paris, the resulting scramble for liquidity on the Continent further depressed share value in Britain and produced a full-fledged rout. By September, 1720 South Sea Company stock was trading at one hundred and fifty pounds, having lost almost ninety percent of its value in two months. Banks failed, goldsmiths failed, thousands of people – including many members of the landed gentry – were reduced to financial ruin, Parliament conducted a series of fraud investigations, and the raft of ministers responsible for creating the South Seas Company to begin with – including the sitting Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Postmaster General, and the Southern Secretary – were impeached, removed from office, and, in at least one case, imprisoned. 

Returning to the subject at hand, one may now be given to wonder how it was that George Clinton could possibly have perceived the contemporary British House of Commons as evidence in itself of the positive effect of the size of a legislature on the frequency of political corruption therein when, in living memory, it had shown itself to be any but. To be sure, on the level of delegates per person, the lower house of Parliament was theoretically more representative of the population of Great Britain than the proposed Congress would have been of the population of the United States. And it could not be denied that this same legislature, in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution (1688), had seen its way clear to proposing and adopting the Bill of Rights (1689), a bold declaration of individual civil liberties and one of the most significant documents in the entire Anglo-American legal tradition. In point of fact, however, this was about all a person could honestly say in favor of the contemporary House of Commons. Many of its constituencies were exceptionally undemocratic – too small, too large, or entirely devoid of human life – especially vulnerable to corruption, freely available for purchase, or bought and paid for by a particular interest or family. And while it was certainly possible for the haphazard patchwork of electoral regulations that reigned in the counties and boroughs represented in the lower house of Parliament to produce a body of legislatures whose collective integrity belied the often dubious means by which they obtained their seats, actual events demonstrated otherwise. Notwithstanding the fact that, as Clinton conceived it, it should have been prohibitively difficult for any exterior interest to secure the cooperation of a majority of five hundred and fifty Members of Parliament for the purpose of setting in motion some manner of corrupt scheme demonstrably at odds with the public welfare, the founders of the South Sea Company did exactly that.

True, Harley and many of his collaborators were themselves MPs and government ministers and could thus only partially be classified as an outside interest. But John Blunt (1665-1733), the director of the Hollow Sword Blade Company, was not, and it was Blunt whose earlier financial machinations with devalued army pensions and forfeited Irish land formed the nucleus of what would become the South Sea Company concept. Blunt helped draw up the plans, became one of the Company’s directors, worked to drive up the share price, and helped to foil the aforementioned Parliamentary investigation by authorizing a judicious transfer of stock. Certainly he enjoyed a great deal of cooperation from within Parliament itself, to the extent that Harley should rightfully be thought of as the co-originator of the scheme. But this admission does nothing to alter the fact that Blunt, the representative of a private business interest, did a great deal to sell the idea of the South Sea Company to the critical mass of MPs necessary to secure the requisite government approvals. Regardless of how many of them there were, he and Harley seemed only to require the promise of profit to purchase their cooperation at the expense of their constituents. Indeed, based on the success they enjoyed in the immediate, the South Sea Company directors would likely not have been dismayed by the prospect of having to gain the cooperation of yet more MPs. Having purchased the support of a majority of five hundred and fifty representatives with relative ease as it was, they would surely have seized upon the prospect of six hundred, or seven hundred, or even one thousand MPs with similar alacrity. Far from being daunted or even dissuaded by such numbers, they likely would have seen every extra vote in need of purchase as another opportunity to cement the approval of their scheme, align the interests of Parliament with their own, and further drive up the South Sea Company share price.

As aforementioned, George Clinton’s use of the pseudonym Cato for his anti-constitutional missives would seem a strong indication that, despite all of the events described above having taken place years before he was born and an ocean away, he was very much aware of the circumstances and implications thereof. Cato’s Letters, one of the most influential publications within the British Whig tradition – of which the Commonwealth party formed a radical subset – had its origins in the need felt by a pair of polemicists to respond to the depth and breadth of corruption which they believed the rise and fall of the South Sea Company represented. George Clinton could have adopted any number of names to append to the bottom of his various essays in critique of the proposed constitution – the variety of monikers utilized by his fellow Anti-Federalists attesting to the same – but it was the penname selected by these aforementioned Whig polemicists on which he ultimately settled. Choosing to eschew the notion that Clinton chose to sign the name Cato either carelessly or at random – that is to say, giving Clinton some amount of credit for acting with intention – the principle question behind the inquiry at hand would seem to remain. If there was little if any evidence to be found in either contemporary American legislative circles or in the recent history and composition of the British House of Commons to support Clinton’s claim that larger legislatures were less vulnerable to corruption than smaller ones then what exactly was he driving at in the cited text of Cato V?

Of course it was possible that Clinton was speaking purely in theory, or that there was more to his understanding of the relationship between representation and corruption than his mention of the same in Cato V would have indicated. Perhaps he took it as a given, and believed his readers would do the same, that for any legislature to benefit from the phenomenon he described it would first have to establish itself on a sound, transparent, and consistent foundation. That is to say, it would have to be more like the Congress described by the proposed constitution – whose seat allocations and electoral regulations remained essentially the same across every legislative district in the country – and less like the contemporary British House of Commons – whose constituencies represented a haphazard patchwork of medieval-era traditions and practises that had gone almost entirely unreformed since their inception. Based on this assumption – which seems, on balance, a fairly safe one – it was more likely the principle represented by the House of Commons that Clinton was pointing to in Cato V than the practice thereof. Naturally there was bound to be corruption afoot when so many of the legislators in question were chosen by such manifestly corrupt and self-interested means. Eliminate opportunities for corruption in the selection process, however, and the validity of the principle in question will naturally make itself evident. Because of course men who are elected by self-interested means will act in a self-interested manner. And just so, men who are elected in such a way as to accurately represent the interests and desires of their constituents will naturally be harder to bribe. Certainly they will not be immune to a man from the temptation of personal enrichment or the coercive power of fear. But at least their collective baseline resistance to corruption will be higher.

Based on this manner of reasoning, Clinton’s belief in the ability of larger groups of legislators to better resist corruption than smaller groups would appear to be little more than a straightforward numbers game. If the means by which lawmakers are elected can be established on a basis of consistency and transparency, to the point that every member of the relevant legislature can be said to accurately represent the interests and the will of a majority of their constituents, then the only factor which would seem likely to increase the ongoing level of political corruption therein would be the moral quality of the average legislator. This is, of course, a very difficult trait to measure. Some people, for whatever reason, will reliably give way to temptation given the right set of circumstances. And other people, for equally unknowable reasons, will not. If the frequency of individuals susceptible to temptation is higher on average across the human race than is the frequency of individuals immune to the same, then the idea that larger legislatures are safer from corruption than smaller ones would seem to be essentially baseless. However many legislators are allocated per person, and on however transparent a basis, more of them will be more likely to give way to self-interest should the opportunity arise. If, on the other hand, the reverse is true, and the frequency of individuals immune to temptation is higher on average than the frequency of individuals vulnerable to temptation, then Clinton’s principle would seem to be quite sound. In a reality in which more constitutionally honest people exist than not, increasing the number of representatives per person in any given legislature will inevitably bring more of them into government.

Granted, this all represents a fairly metaphysical approach to constitutionalism, and one whose validity can’t ever really be proven or refuted. That isn’t to say it’s a wholly meritless approach, of course. An essential part of any process which results in the creation or modification of the structures of government is an ongoing consideration of how and why humans act the way that they do. Political institutions, in this sense, are a species of machine which transform the actions, ambitions, and weaknesses of individuals into actionable public policy. Knowledge of human nature provides insight into how and by whom the machine is going to be used, ways in which it might become victim to sabotage, and the best means of keeping it running smoothly and in accordance with its design. Clinton’s evident conviction, therefore, that human beings are more honest as a species than they are not is both entirely relevant to the question of legislative composition and entirely valid as an answer in itself.

Or at the very least it is valid in theory. That the whole structure of Clinton’s argument takes place almost entirely in principle arguably points to both the essential strength and the primary weakness of the concept which he seemed so keen to put forward. Maybe human beings really are more honest and forthright than they are deceitful and duplicitous and the propensity of the latter traits to make themselves known in public office is merely a consequence of an imperfect representation of the general will. As strides continue to be made towards translating the actual interests of a given community into political representation and public policy, this may yet be conclusively proven as a verifiable truth. In this sense, Clinton may have at least been hinting at something of essential significance to the science and practice of government. But then again he may have been wrong, and not just because people tend to favor self-interest more than he believed was the case. As machines, political institutions are more than just the sum of the people that operate inside them. Their ability to function as their designers intended is also continuously shaped by the conditions in which they operate and the rules by which different components are replaced. Properly maintained, a political institution may theoretically function at an optimum level of effectiveness for an indefinite interval without the need for significant overhaul or repair. But condition in fact can rarely be accounted for in theory by even the most thoughtful and far-sighted designers. The machine, in consequence, may be used for too long without inspection, develop flaws, or be overtaken by changing conditions. It accordingly begins to malfunction, its malfunctions are ignored, and in time enough it starts to operate at a fraction of its intended output.

To a large extent, this is exactly what happened to the British House of Commons. Though on its face – and certainly by contemporary European standards – it was a remarkably representative body whose ability to hold the powers of the monarchy in check was entirely without peer, its ability to provide an accurate representation of the British people diminished in approximate proportion to the time that passed following the establishment of this or that procedure. County seats and borough seats – of whatever subtype – were doubtless founded with the intention of ensuring that the distinct communities of which Britain was comprised enjoyed the degree of influence warranted by their size and location. But time and inattention wreaked havoc with the whole scheme. Formerly prosperous market towns were displaced by new constructions, blighted by economic downturns, or fell prey to natural disasters while elsewhere small electorates grew to understand that their votes come election time were worth far more in trade than in practice. The quality of the people’s representation did not outwardly appear to suffer; the number of MPs per person remained relatively high. But the integrity of the machine began to suffer, from use and misuse in arguably equal measure. In this sense, Clinton seemed to be speaking reasonably rather than empirically in the cited passage of Cato V. That is to say, rather than speak based on what the evidence of his senses told him, he attempted to draw conclusions from what he believed to be logical. Yes, he would doubtless have admitted, the contemporary House of Commons was notoriously corrupt. And in that sense it was hardly a fit model for emulation in the United States of America. But at least it allocated seats in reasonable proportion to the population for which it claimed to speak. Purge it of its various electoral eccentricities and it will function in such a manner as the American people would do well to pay heed.

But therein, as ever, lays the rub. It is very easy to say that protecting a legislature from falling prey to corruption is simply a matter of getting more people into government – believing, of course, that people are generally honest. But it is quite another to put in place such measures as would achieve this outcome while avoiding any number of unintended complications. The version of Congress described in the text of the proposed constitution arguably represented exactly the kind of rational and transparent model of legislative assembly that a critic of the contemporary British House of Commons would doubtless have held up as an ideal alternative. And though Clinton as Cato registered a number of complaints against the same over the course of his various anti-constitutional missives, the fact that he urged the expansion of the number of Representatives therein would seem to indicate that he did not entirely disagree. Had he believed that the whole conception of Congress embedded in the text of the proposed constitution was invalid he could just as well have said so. That he did not, and instead offered a detailed list of what he believed to be its faults and failures, would seem to indicate that he was at least open to the idea of Congress as constructed by the Framers. Presumably, if the issues to which he attempted to draw attention were addressed to his satisfaction he would have shifted from opposing ratification to supporting it. That is to say, if Representatives in Congress were chosen on an annual rather than biennial basis, and if each of them was allocated to a district containing fifteen thousand or twenty thousand rather than thirty thousand people, Clinton might well have seen his way clear to deeming the project as a whole to be broadly acceptable.

Contrasting directly the respective electoral frameworks of the proposed Congress and the contemporary House of Common would seem to reveal quite clearly why someone like George Clinton might have favored the former at least in part, provided that its architects adopted a number of key modifications. As aforementioned, the House of Commons (circa 1790) contained some five hundred and fifty-eight MPs elected every five to seven years – there being no fixed term of office – to represent a population of about ten million. While this averaged out to one MP for every eighteen thousand people, the different electoral regulations in place in different parts of the country ensured that many communities were either grossly overrepresented or alarmingly underrepresented. As aforementioned, there were county constituencies containing several thousand people, freeholder boroughs containing several hundred, scot and lot boroughs containing fewer than ten, and burgage boroughs containing none at all. Regardless of these irregularities, however – and which included county seats containing several hundred thousand people – most constituencies sent at least two MPs to Westminster. By comparison, the version of Congress described by the Framers in the text of the proposed constitution was exceptionally consistent in terms of structure and operation. Each Representative would stand for election every two years within a district containing no less than thirty-thousand people. A census was to be held every ten years to aid in maintaining this ratio of legislators to constituents and seats would be reapportioned as needed on a broad basis of equality. These rules would apply with equal force in New York or Georgia, Pennsylvania or South Carolina, as well as consistently within the boundaries of each of the states themselves.

Again, though Clinton most definitely took issue with certain specific aspects of this plan, he could not but have held it as a far better basis upon which to establish a national legislative regime than that which underpinned the contemporary British House of Commons. It was only the ratio of legislators to constituents exhibited by the latter which he seemed to believe should have been replicated in the former. As mentioned above, every MP seated in Westminster as of the late 1780s and early 1790s represented about eighteen thousand people on average. But by the terms of Article I, Section 2 of the proposed constitution, “The Number of Representatives [in Congress] shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand [.]” Granting that the consistency embodied by this selfsame text almost certainly guaranteed that more Americans would enjoy a fairly accurate representation in Congress than would most British people in the House of Commons, the figure of thirty thousand people (or greater) for every district represented in the lower house of Congress still appeared to be too broad for George Clinton. To his thinking, it seemed, that base number needed to be lower: twenty thousand, perhaps, or fifteen thousand, or ten thousand, or even five thousand. Only once they could claim to enjoy such a fine-grained representation in their national legislature could the American people rest easy in the knowledge that their interests were not being unnecessarily elided or abstracted by the national government that they had consented to erect. And only in the event that as many people were sent to the proposed House of Representatives as was reasonably possible could that body truly claim to be anywhere near to being safe from “the influence of corruption, and the temptation of treachery.”

Cato V, Part VI: Freeman, Pot Wallopers, and the Unreformed House of Commons

Having thus far explored the nature of political corruption as George Clinton would have known it in late 18^th century America and found little to suggest that anything he experienced directly would have led him to believe – as he seemed to state in the text of Cato V – that larger legislatures were more secure from corruption than small ones, it would accordingly appear necessary to turn elsewhere in search of potential explanations. Specifically, recalling Clinton’s citation of “the history of representation in England” in the seventh and last paragraph of the aforementioned essay, it would seem at least possible that the Parliament of Great Britain served as a source of inspiration for this provocative claim. Its numbers, after all, far exceeded those of the proposed House of Representatives, and indeed of any of the legislatures of the various American states. Perhaps Clinton saw in this a viable model to be emulated.

As has been already been demonstrated, however, the House of Commons was not less corrupt for its size than either Congress or the New York State Legislature. On the contrary, it was substantially more corrupt than either of these bodies. The primary reason for this should be fairly obvious. Though the House of Commons contained a substantially greater number of representatives per constituent than any comparable body in the United States – thereby presumably creating significant barriers against a theoretical campaign of coordinated influence – said individuals were generally selected on something less than a rigorously democratic basis. Based on the electoral qualifications in place in a given constituency – county or borough, freeman or scot and lot, corporation or householder – the actual number of electors could vary considerably, the effects of which ranging from mild to quite severe. In a county constituency, for example, the franchise belonged to all adult males who could claim ownership of property valued at a minimum of two pounds per year according to the land tax rolls. As the value of the pound decreased over time, this basic qualification – established in 1430 and left unchanged for some four hundred years – allowed more and more people in county ridings to claim the right to vote. By the time of the Great Reform Act (1832), the total number of county electors in England accordingly stood at about one hundred and ninety thousand. Granting that, in spite of this relatively robust electorate, elections in county seats often went uncontested – and indeed often resulted in the same handful of landed families possessing seats in Parliament for generations – this was as much a matter of culture as it was a question of design. County elections in otherwise sleepy districts could often be fiercely fought during moments of particularly intense partisan strife, and certain ridings in particular – Middlesex being the most obvious, containing as it did a large portion of suburban London – were more often than not the sites of rigorous contests involving a large and exceptionally engaged electorate.

Borough seats, on the other hand, were among some of the most corrupt in the entire unreformed House of Commons owning to a combination of their static boundaries and narrow qualifications. Freeman boroughs were theoretically the most democratic, the requirements of freeman status being determined on a district-by-district basis. The City of London, for example, averaged about seven thousand freemen over the course of the 18^th century, and about a quarter of the nearly one hundred that remained identified at least one thousand electors each. Elections in these constituencies were almost always contested, with campaigns that pivoted on relevant political issues rather than the local popularity of the candidates in question or the ability of a given patron to purchase the loyalty of the voters. Many more freeman boroughs, however, counted less than two hundred electors in total and were almost entirely under the influence of a single wealthy beneficiary or local landed family. Scot and lot boroughs – so named for the local tax one paid in order to qualify to vote – were similar to freeman boroughs in the wide range of democratic quality that they respectively occupied. On one end of the spectrum was the London riding of Westminster whose electors ranged from eight thousand to twelve thousand over the course of the 18^th century. Westminster had one of the largest voting populations in all of contemporary Britain, almost always witnessed contested elections, and became a hotbed of radical politics in the 1770s and 1780s. And then there was Gatton, in Surrey, whose total voting population at one point fell as low as two. Since the constituency continued to elect two MPs until its abolition in 1832, this meant that for a time during its almost four hundred year history each Member of Parliament for Gatton represented exactly one person.

  Corporation boroughs – of which, in the unreformed House of Commons, there were twenty-seven in total – removed even the illusion of popular participation in the democratic process (such as it was) by restricting the franchise solely to members of the local governing authority. None of the relevant borough councils contained more than sixty members, many contained far fewer, and the majority eventually found themselves in the pocket of some wealthy patron or other whose political aspirations could very easily be served by putting a little money in the pockets of a few dozen local officials. Susceptible as these kinds of constituencies might have been to corruption, however, the burgage boroughs were arguably worse. In districts such as these, the electorate was comprised of the owners of specifically designated properties – a house, a farm, or even an empty field where something of value used to be – whether they actually resided in area or not. Certain burgage boroughs accordingly became notorious for sending MPs to Westminster whose formal constituencies contained no living human beings. In addition, because the franchise in such constituencies was tied very directly to property ownership – in a one-to-one fashion, in fact – a single, non-resident individual could conceivably purchase all of the relevant properties and cast every vote themselves. The burgage borough of Old Sarum very much typified this kind of arrangement. Though once the site of a cathedral, a supporting town, and even a royal palace, the prominence of Old Saurm was eventually displaced by the emergence of the town of Salisbury and its buildings were eventually pillaged for much-needed materials. By 1322 it had already fallen into severe neglect; by the 18^th century it was an uninhabited hillside essentially owned by the Pitt family.

Perhaps the most problematic borough subtype represented in the 18^th century House of Commons was known alternately by the names “householder” and “pot-walloper.” So called because the franchise was open to every resident male householder who was not actively receiving either alms or poor relief – and could thus be said to at least have access to a hearth and pot – householder boroughs were paradoxically among the most democratic in all of Britain and counted among their number some of the most nakedly corrupt. The problem, by and large, was that householder boroughs tended to be quite small and their electorate quite poor. The borough of Northampton, it was true, counted over one thousand electors as early as the 17^th century, and many others were centered on fairly substantial towns which included among their inhabitants several hundred qualified voters. But more often the pot-wallopers contained less than one hundred total electors whose partisan support tended to be open to negotiation. In some cases this was a matter of individual initiative. At Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire in 1761, for example, one of the victorious candidates opted simply to pay the voters the sum of five pounds each for their backing. In other cases the residents actually banded together to bargain for a higher overall rate, essentially turning the vote into a kind of impromptu auction. While these kinds of practises were perhaps not the norm – the dispensing of large quantities of alcohol was easily the most common means by which electoral loyalty was secured – they nevertheless speak very effectively to the overall character of the householder subtype of borough constituency. They tended to be small, their electors perfectly willing to trade their vote – which would hardly keep them fed if they sought to use it “responsibly,” or else provide them with a night’s supply of beer or cider – and their representatives accordingly both wealthy and unscrupulous.

In light of the fact that the various types of constituencies described above accounted – along with the Welsh county seats, the Scottish county and burgh seats, and the university seats – for the entirety of the composition of the late 18^th century House of Commons, it would seem exceptionally difficult to imagine how it was that someone like George Clinton could possibly have concluded by way of observation that the extensive representation therein served as a practical bulwark against legislative corruption. Clearly, though there were almost six hundred constituencies represented in the contemporary House of Commons, a great many of them were subject to alarming levels of corruption simply on the basis of how their respective elections were held. Some, it bears recalling, were possessed of quite large and robust electorates whose attention tended to be focused on issues rather than personalities, and who consequently showed by their habit of producing very close results that their representation would in the end actually be the product of their evolving interests as a community. Many more, however, contained very small numbers of voters, or voters who were easily purchased, or no voters at all. From these constituencies, one would have been hard pressed to expect the election of anything close to an accurate representation of the needs and desires of the relevant populations. Rather, by way of custom, influence, the dispensing of bribes, and the purchasing of property rights, these seats – absent some kind of wide-ranging reform – would inevitably fall into the hands of the wealthy, the ambitious, and those least concerned with fulfilling the promise embodied specifically by the Bill of Rights (1689) and fundamentally by the concept of representative government. 

Potential for malfeasance is not the same as proof of malfeasance, of course. The fact that a sizable percentage of the five hundred and fifty-eight seats of which the House of Commons was comprised in the late 18^th century were elected as a result of bribery, coercion, or the otherwise unrepresentative nature of certain borough constituencies did not necessarily guarantee that the assembled MPs would proceed to conduct themselves in a similarly corrupt manner. Verification of the unsuitability of the contemporary House of Commons as an example of the positive relationship between the size of a given legislature and its relative resistance to corruption requires some manner of practical evidence. That is to say, notwithstanding the manner by which many of them were chosen, did the MPs who sat in the House of Commons over the course of the 18^th century ever act in a manner that could be said to have betrayed the vulnerability of said body to widespread political corruption? By way of an answer, one instance in particular comes to mind of which an Anglo-American individual adopting the nom de plume Cato in the latter half of the 18^th century was almost certain to have been aware. Cato, as it happened, was the same pseudonym adopted by a pair of British writers active between the 1680s and 1740s named John Trenchard (1662-1723) and Thomas Gordon (1691-1750) for a series of polemic essays published in the London Journal between the years 1720 and 1723. Cato’s Letters, as they have since become known, formed an essential part of the British “Commonwealth party” tradition whose members, though exiled to the fringes of contemporary political discourse, nonetheless loudly decried the influence of corruption in British politics and advocated civic virtue and republicanism as potential cures for what they believed was then ailing British society. Published over the course of three years, the one hundred and forty-four Letters sought to respond to a great many things, and in the process laid the ideological groundwork for continued radical political agitation both in Britain proper and its colonial periphery. The issue which set Trenchard and Gordon writing in the first place, however, was the collapse of the so-called “South Sea Company” in the autumn of 1720. 

Cato V, Part V: The Influence of Corruption

As George Clinton saw it – and as he, as Cato, explained it – the representation allocated by the proposed constitution to the state of New York in the lower house of Congress was simply too small. By the terms of said document, submitted to the people of the state of New York for their ratification or rejection in the fall of 1787, they were to be collectively represented in the House of Representatives by a bare six people elected via districts for two years each. Bearing in mind that this same population was then being spoken for in the New York State Legislature by twenty-four senators and sixty-five delegates, their ratification of this arrangement would have necessarily entailed a tacit agreement to forgo the same quality of representation in Congress which they enjoyed at home. There were a number of reasons why this should have been the case, several of which will be discussed at length as this present series progresses. Yet none of them seemed to satisfy Clinton, or did much to allay his sense of suspicion. No, six was too few for his liking, and the reason behind such a paltry representation too obvious not to raise his concern. As he explained in the seventh paragraph of Cato V, “It is a very important objection to this government, that the representation consists of so few; too few to resist the influence of corruption, and the temptation to treachery, against which all governments ought to take precautions [.]” To Clinton’s thinking, it seemed, the reformed Congress described by the proposed constitution would not contain enough Representatives to successfully resist the threat of corruption. Whether or not he believed this to be part and parcel of the Framer’s intentions – he did not say so explicitly, though his political sympathies tended that way – it nevertheless followed he would have preferred to see the ratio of Representatives to constituents substantially altered. Specifically, and in the name of subverting possible attempts by nefarious forces to take control of Congress by way of bribery or intimidation, he thought it necessary that there be more Representatives per person than the text of the proposed constitution had explicitly allowed. 

As to the rationale behind the clause of the proposed constitution which declared that, “The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand,” efficacy was doubtless the single quality which the Framers were most eager to promote. Whereas Congress under the terms of the Articles of Confederation had often been sluggish and ineffectual, Congress under the terms of the proposed constitution was designed to operate in a brisk and decisive fashion, trading consensus and transparency for speed and efficiency. Replicating the degree of representation then practiced in the various state legislatures in Congress would accordingly have been somewhat self-defeating. Taking New York’s aforementioned sixty-five delegates as an average –acknowledging that certain other states possessed much smaller local legislative contingents – and multiplying that by the total number of states (13), the resulting reformed Congress would seemingly have contained something on the order of eight hundred elected representatives. Recalling that not even the House of Commons contained more than six hundred MPs as of the late 1780s – and that in the late 2010s it has yet to exceed six hundred and fifty – this would have constituted one of the largest democratic legislatures in human history. Adding to this already daunting figure the various complications that would have faced any attempt to create a national government in the United States in the late 18^th century – from deficiencies in transportation and communications infrastructure to the highly seasonal labor demands of what was still principally an agricultural society – and it would seem little wonder that the Framers opted for a ratio of representation in Congress that was somewhat less finely grained.

Granting, then, that exactly mirroring the collective compositions of the state legislatures in Congress would have been practically undesirable within the context of the late 1780s, Clinton’s critique of what he perceived to be the paltry representation described by the proposed constitution nevertheless bears some thought. If the deficiencies inherent in contemporary communications and transportation technologies had not been a factor, would the Framers have agreed with Clinton that more Representatives per person were preferable to fewer? And for that matter, was Clinton right in his assessment that the more delegates that sat in a legislature the more resistant that legislature would become to corruption? As representative democracy has become an increasingly common form of government in countries across the globe since the publication of Cato V in November, 1787, and as legislative corruption continues to present an urgent threat to this same positive trend, these kinds of questions would seem to possess an enduring relevance. Yet still, if texts like Cato V are going to be looked to for answers, one must be very careful not to impute more knowledge to their authors than they could possibly have possessed. Clinton’s evident contention that larger legislative assemblies are more resistant to corruption than small ones was, and is, entirely reasonable in and of itself. But before adopting this position as one’s own and proceeding to apply it to the context of the political present, it would seem only prudent to ask by what manner could Clinton have come to this conclusion and what wasn’t he aware of that might have otherwise colored his opinion? George Clinton, like many of the Founders, may yet be a source of tremendous insight and wisdom notwithstanding how foreign many of his basic assumptions and experiences would have been to our own. But he, and they, must be met, not as divine sages whose words entirely transcend the era in which they were written, but as people who lived and worked within the context of a particular moment in time and whose insights were accordingly limited by what it was possible for them to see and to imagine.

Let us consider, to that end, how it was George Clinton ultimately came to believe, within the context of a legislative assembly, that a larger representation presented a better guarantee against corruption than a smaller one. His home state of New York doubtless provided some manner of example. As mentioned previously, the lower house of the State Assembly was comprised of some sixty-five delegates as of the late 1780s. And though at that time this number was still very much dominated by the hereditary landed interests against which Clinton as Governor regularly found himself arrayed, they were not known for being particularly corrupt. Indeed, it was not until the mid-to-late 19^th century that the New York Assembly and the New York Senate would accrue a collective reputation for endemic influence trading, bribery, and embezzlement. This isn’t to say, of course, that political corruption didn’t exist in the United States prior to the emergence of railroad trusts and robber barons. Looking beyond just New York to the American republic as a whole, land speculation was an exceedingly common practice among a certain class of contemporary Americans throughout the latter half of the 18^th century.

As it happened, of course, many of these speculators had either close connections with state and national government or were themselves officers of the same. No less than George Washington (1732-1799), James Madison (1751-1836), James Monroe (1758-1831), Patrick Henry (1736-1799), and Clinton’s own father Charles (1690-1773) were all involved at one time or another in exactly this kind of scheme, often as not though organizations like the Ohio Company of Associates (est.1786) or the Scioto Company (est. 1789). Such join-stock ventures attempted to leverage the ongoing desperation of the national government under the Articles for some source of revenue in order to secure the purchase of massive tracts of federally-owned land in the West which it could then resell to homesteaders at a profit. Though the fact that many of the primary investors in such projects were either sitting or former members of Congress evidently did not strike the relevant authorities as cause for much concern, it would nonetheless be difficult to imagine that everyone involved remained at all times unaware of how certain benefits were being accrued and to whom those benefits ultimately flowed. The directors of the Ohio Company – or private speculators like Washington, Henry, or Madison – did not attempt to promote the settlement of the this or that region of the United States out of some patriotic desire to see the country fulfill its destiny as a robust and self-sufficient “Empire of Liberty.” Rather, they sought to exploit shifting migration patterns, ongoing demographic changes, and government malaise in order to turn a personal profit. Perhaps this was not considered to be improper because the speculators were the ones paying the government rather than the other way around. The same could not be said of certain other species of speculation.

Consider, to that end, the career of Robert Morris (1734-1806). English-born and Pennsylvania-raised, Morris had become exceptionally wealthy as a merchant operating out of Philadelphia over the course of the 1750s and 1760s. In the 1770s, when his reluctance to support radical action against an increasingly heavy-handed British administration in North America was finally overcome by Britain’s evident willingness to resort to force of arms, he thereafter became one of the primary directors of finance and supply for the Continental Congress. While in this role one of his primary accomplishments was the consistent procurement of arms and ammunition for the Continental Army via a robust network of smugglers – an achievement for which he is rightly lauded – Morris also made use of his newfound responsibilities to achieve a number of personal victories which only the ongoing war effort could have made possible. As a member – and later as chairman – of the secretive Committee of Trade, for example, he enjoyed virtually unsupervised authority over the awarding of supply contracts on behalf of the Continental Army and the Continental Navy. That he and many of his fellow committee members were also prominent merchants naturally complicated this arrangement. Absent any formal oversight – there being neither an executive branch nor anything like an inspector general to contend with – what reason did Morris and his associates have not to award contracts to themselves? It would have been expedient to do so, of course, and the ongoing war was certainly a reasonable cause for expediency. But it also would have entailed a cabal of businessmen using the authority granted them by their respective state governments and by Congress to funnel public funds into their own pockets. Transparent, such practices were certainly not.

And then there was the Bank of North America, essentially the first national bank ever chartered in the United States. Its purpose, as with its successor the 1^st Bank of the United States, was to provide the government with a mechanism by which it could take out loans and consolidate a line of credit without needing to reach out directly to private individuals or foreign governments. And while the need for such an institution was first made explicit by Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804), it was Robert Morris who proposed the idea to Congress and ultimately secured the approval of a charter. At this point, in late December of 1781, Morris had been serving as Congress’s Superintendent of Finance for the better part of a year, an office he would continue to occupy until 1784. In spite of his concomitant role in directing the economic policy of the government of the United States, however, Morris himself ended up purchasing over sixty percent of the Bank of North America’s shares when they subsequently went on sale at $400 apiece. The money that the United States was thereafter in a position to borrow was thus largely Morris’s, to whom the majority of the accrued interest would likewise be paid. Combined with the aforementioned fact of Morris having helped design and charter the institution itself, it would seem rather difficult in hindsight not view the Bank of North America as little more than a mechanism by which an already very wealthy man attempted to become wealthier.

Granted, one might also fairly characterize Robert Morris’s purchase of the majority share of the selfsame bank issue as a selfless attempt on his part to personally absorb the financial risk which his government had no choice but to undertake. Not knowing whether Congress would ever manage to pay back what it borrowed, he nevertheless placed his own fortune at the disposal of his countrymen so that they, too, might prosper as he had already. The only problem with this understanding of Morris’s actions would seem to be the manner in which his resulting financial involvement with the Bank of North America would likely have affected his responsibilities as Superintendent of Finance. Notwithstanding his presumed selflessness in putting forth his fortune for public use to begin with, it would be hard to imagine that none of the decisions Morris made going forward as the principle authority in the realm of national economic policy would be at all colored by even a subconscious desire to either see a profit on his initial investment or at least recoup what he had spent. Perhaps this didn’t represent exactly the kind of influence that Clinton warned against in the text of Cato V, being internal rather than external. All the same, it speaks to the degree to which he was right to draw attention to the possibility of the American republic’s political processes becoming entangled with interests and motivations that had no relation at all to the needs of the American people at large.

No doubt Clinton was aware of all of these goings-on in some capacity or other. He knew George Washington and Robert Morris, and what they did with their money, and how they were invested. Save for the proceedings of the Board of Trade, such things were all a matter of public record. And he certainly must have been conscious of how his father had dealt in land. But there would hardly seem to be much connection between these kinds of practices – be they corrupt or merely somewhat improper – and the effects of this or that ratio of elected representation upon the moral integrity of a legislative body. The legislatures of the various states in which land, or bank stock, or securities, or pensions were issued, bought, and sold at a profit throughout the 1780s varied in size and composition to the point that no particular conclusion could seemingly be drawn. Nor did Congress appear to offer much in the way of an object lesson.  Though it was an indirectly elected body as opposed to a directly elected one, its membership tended to hover at around fifty delegates at any given time. And while this would seem to have compared favorably to the sixty-five seat lower house of New York’s state legislature, the membership of Congress had clearly shown themselves to be far from immune to the potential advantages one might derive from mixing public service and private interest.

Cato V, Part IV: A Complete and Full Representation

While it is not normally the purview of this series to draw direct comparisons between philosophical or political concepts which were in circulation during the American Founding and their 21^st century equivalents – such things seeming to be best understood within their own particular historical context – it would be impossible to deny that part of what makes Cato V such an interesting object of study is the degree to which it appears to anticipate and/or converse with issues of enduring political significance. Certainly there were others among the Anti-Federalists who waded into these very same waters in some aspect or other of their many and various missives. The proper frequency of elections, for example, was a relatively common point of reference for these scribes, and one whose ongoing relevancy is demonstrated whenever circumstances conspire to place national polls for a given office too close together for the evident comfort of the public. Just so, as a great many of the Anti-Federalist Papers declared that the essential rights of the American people would need to be specifically enumerated before the proposed constitution might attain ratification, so too do modern statesmen, scholars, and activists continue to actively discuss the scope and nature of individual civil rights within such ever-evolving contexts as privacy, sexuality, gender identity, and bodily autonomy. Cato V cannot accordingly be thought of as unique by the mere fact that it engages with certain issues whose relevancy in the political sphere has not in the slightest bit diminished since 1787. Where Cato V does stand out, however, is in the succinctness of its commentary and the degree to which its author was able to present himself and his opinions in an exceptionally clear and incisive manner. Connecting his work to modern conversations on the same basic topic is thus so easy as to nearly accomplish itself.

Consider, by way of example, two assertions which Clinton offered in the seventh and last paragraph of Cato V. In the first, directed at yet another of what Clinton considered to be the essential flaws embedded in the text of the proposed constitution and addressed to the citizens of his home state of New York, he declared that,

It is a very important objection to this government, that the representation consists of so few; too few to resist the influence of corruption, and the temptation to treachery, against which all governments ought to take precautions -- how guarded you have been on this head, in your own state constitution, and yet the number of senators and representatives proposed for this vast continent, does not equal those of your own state.

The second assertion, located further on in the text of the same paragraph, expanded upon this same idea by first posing a question – “Can it be asserted with truth, that six men can be a complete and full representation of the numbers and various orders of people in this state?” – and by then providing a counterpoint to the supposed predilection of the Framers for a very “imperfect” representation in the lower house of Congress. “The more complete it is,” Clinton avowed, “The better will your interests be preserved, and the greater the opportunity you will have to participate in government, one of the principal securities of a free people.” As with elections to that same body of legislators, Clinton was evidently of the opinion that more was always better than less, inasmuch as he valued a very broad dissemination of political opportunity and experience.

Upon due consideration, there would seem to be at least two distinct ideas embedded in the passages cited above. On one hand, Clinton evidently believed that the fewer representatives a given community could elect the more likely it was that those representatives would fall prey to, “The influence of corruption, and the temptation to treachery [.]” Though he did not say as much, the logic behind this assertion appears to be that, all things being equal, it is more likely that a dozen people possessed of political authority – or enough of them to constitute a majority – will fall prey to some kind of nefarious outside influence than will a hundred in the same position. The more that power is diffused, therefore, the harder it is for it to be corrupted. And on the other hand, Clinton also seemed to think that a larger representation was superior to a smaller representation just on general principles because it allowed for a more thorough understanding within the legislative process of the issues facing specific communities and permitted more people to either become directly involved in public affairs or to cherish at least the possibility of the same. It was always better, in short, to send one person to represent five thousand people than fifty thousand, and better yet to send one to represent five hundred. The more that each individual community within a given state could feel as though its interests were being accounted for within the national legislative process, the healthier said state will inevitably be.

These are, as aforementioned, exceedingly relevant ideas within the present context of the early 21^st century. Political corruption – particularly within the legislative process – remains as vital a topic of political debate now as when Clinton offered his take on it at the end of the 1780s. Likewise, the ideal ratio of representatives to those they represent is as yet a vital subtext of any of the conversations presently taking place on the subject of electoral reform, government formation, or apportionment. That being said, before digging into the relationship of Cato V to any of these topics, a few facts and figures ought to be established. First, it would seem a worthwhile exercise to verify the claim which Clinton appeared to make in the text cited above. Addressing the citizens of the state of New York, he claimed that, “The number of senators and representatives proposed for this vast continent, does not equal those of your own state.” For the record, as of the first decennial census mandated by the Constitution in the year 1790, the total population of the United States of America was 3,929,214. Of that, the population of New York on its own accounted for 340,120. As the American republic could accordingly claim to contain over ten times as many people as the state of New York, Clinton would no doubt have preferred that the combined representation of the American people in Congress should accordingly exceed by a similar ratio that which the Empire State could boast in its own legislative assembly. That this was not the case, he avowed, should have been a source of grave concern, and reason enough to reject the proposed constitution. In actual fact, however, the combined representation of the upper and lower house of Congress did exceed that of the upper and lower house of the New York General Assembly. Between the Senate and the House of Representatives, Congress was comprised of a total of ninety-one legislators as of the first presidential election in 1789. At that same time, in accordance with the terms laid out in the state’s 1777 constitution, the upper and lower houses of New York’s state legislature contained but eighty-nine total delegates and senators.

While Clinton was therefore technically incorrect in his assertion, the essential point he was trying to make was nonetheless a valid one. Within the legislative assembly of the state of New York circa 1787, the three hundred thousand people residing therein were represented by almost ninety delegates between the upper and lower houses. Of those, twenty-four sat in the state senate – averaging out to one senator for every twelve-thousand people – and sixty-five sat in the assembly – averaging out to one assemblyman for every five thousand people. By comparison, looking at New York alone, the Empire State was to be represented in Congress – as Clinton noted with evident disdain – by only eight delegates, two of which were Senators – each representing the whole three hundred thousand – and six of which were Representatives – each standing for over fifty-six thousand of their fellow New Yorkers. Clearly, by sheer numbers alone, the New York State Legislature would be better suited to translate the specific interests of the inhabitants of the Empire State into actionable policy. This is, in some ways, perfectly reasonable. The proposed national government claimed as its exclusive preserve only such issues as would rise to the level of national significance – i.e. foreign affairs, inter-state commerce, trade, and war, for example. It would accordingly stand to reason that Congress would not need to account for the particular needs of every distinct community in every state in the union. Let New York’s eight delegates speak broadly to New York’s needs in a forum design to handle issues of broad application, therefore, while that same state’s fourscore and nine domestic legislators bring their expertise to bear on matters of domestic importance.

There was just one problem with the arrangement, however. While most of the communities within the state of New York could reasonably claim the attention of a specific assemblyman and senator – and while each of these delegates could reasonably claim fairly detailed knowledge of the communities they claimed to represent – the ratio of apportionment described by the proposed constitution simply wouldn’t allow for the development of such fine-grained relationships between representatives in Congress and their designated constituents. To put it simply, one person might fairly claim to know the needs and interests of five thousand, or even twelve thousand, much more readily than they could of fifty thousand. And while this state of affairs might have been broadly acceptable given the context noted above, it would necessarily entail glossing over the opinions and priorities of great many distinct communities. New York City, for example, though it’s 1790 population of 33,131 would arguably entitle it and its environs to a whole Representative of their own in Congress, was at that same time possessed of nine assemblymen in the lower house of the New York State Legislature. In one sense, the Empire State’s largest city was lucky to have a delegate almost completely to itself within the national political sphere. But in another, it was at a disadvantage for having the interests of its many and varied communities boiled down to a single voice when in other contexts its diversity was far better accounted for.

New York City, as it happened, was by far the most fortunate among the Empire State’s various communities. Dutchess County – whose county seat, Poughkeepsie, was incidentally the site of the New York Ratifying Convention – was also entitled by its 1790 population of 45,276 to more or less claim a Congressman all to itself. But in light of the fact that Dutchess was at that same time possessed of seven assemblymen in the lower house of the New York State Legislature, this could hardly have seemed like much of a boon. Whereas, on the floor of the Assembly, towns that fell within Dutchess County like Rhinebeck, Fishkill, and Pine Plains might have reasonably believed it possible to have an issue of particular importance to them raised and debated, Congress would arguably have presented a far less hospitable environment given the sheer size of the district these selfsame towns would fall into. A representative who needs the majority of the voters out of a constituency of five thousand people, after all, would surely be more inclined to listen to petitions on behalf of even a few hundred than would a representative whose constituency is ten times as large. Granting that this state of affairs was more or less inherent to the Framer’s vision of the manner in which a national government was supposed to function – i.e. by way of abstraction – and bearing in mind that this is essentially how the United States Government has successfully (?) functioned since the 1780s, it was far from unreasonable at the time that Cato V was published in 1787 to raise certain question as to the propriety of this or that scheme of legislative apportionment. Certainly, there were other models then in use which might have offered alternatives to that described by the proposed constitution. The most obvious of these was naturally the one that Clinton mentioned explicitly: the Parliament of Great Britain.

The contemporary British government, of course, was organized along broadly different lines to either the United States Government under the Articles of Confederation or that described by the proposed constitution. The United States was federal, Britain was unitary; the United States was a republic, Britain was a monarchy. Nevertheless, the arrangement of responsibilities between the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the President was similar enough to that between the House of Commons, the House of Lords, and the Crown for an entirely reasonable comparison to be made. As Clinton noted accordingly in the seventh paragraph of Cato V, “The history of representation in England [is that] from which we have taken our model of legislation [.]” Bearing this in mind, consider the following. In 1790, the population of the Great Britain was something on the order of sixteen million. The contemporary House of Commons meanwhile contained some five hundred and fifty-eight seats. Granting that this same body was at the time notorious for either over-representing or under-representing an alarming number of communities, these figures average out to about one Member of Parliament for every twenty-eight thousand people. This, it bears noting, is something like half as many constituents as assigned to every member of Congress according to the terms of the proposed constitution. While Great Britain contained approximately four times the population of the contemporary United States, it was therefore possessed of six times as many representatives in the lower house of its national legislature. British citizens, in short, were at least theoretically guaranteed substantially more accurate and responsive political representation circa 1790 than their American counterparts.

“Theoretically,” of course, implies that the fact of the matter fell somewhat short of the principle. As discussed at length in a previous series, the British House of Commons as it existed at the end of the 18^th century was an almost comically unrepresentative body whose legislators as often owed their election to privilege and patronage as to the support of a particular group of qualified constituents. Ridings whose resident population had shrunk to a few hundred, or in some cases even a few dozen, continued to elect two MPs at the direction of whichever landowner had purchased the right to designate electors. Often as not, these constituencies were centered on towns whose significance as market centers dated from the Medieval era but whose importance as trade hubs had severely diminished due to various economic, social, or even environmental factors. By the same token, a number of major urban centers whose growth had commenced only in the 17^th or 18^th centuries – Manchester, for example, or Birmingham – were wholly without representation in the House of Commons outside of that which belonged to the historical county that they found themselves within. Granting that the average number of constituents per Member of Parliament in the lower house of Parliament was indeed something close to twenty-seven thousand as of the late 1780s and early 1790s, the variation across constituencies could thus be frighteningly wide. Dunwich, for example, which was abolished under the terms of the Great Reform Act (1832), contained only thirty-two electors at the start of the 19^th century who between them sent two members to the House of Commons. Slightly less egregious was the riding of Shaftsbury, whose population of 2,742 circa 1831 elected two MPs; it was later merged with several surrounding parishes until it population reached upwards of eight thousand while its allotment of seats in the House of Commons was reduced by half. And then there was Warwickshire, which by the time of the Great Reform Act contained some three hundred thousand people yet sent only two MPs to Westminster. The terms of said act accordingly split the county into three ridings – one of which, the aforementioned Birmingham, contained one hundred and forty thousand on its own – each electing two MPs.

It would of course have been terribly unlikely – if not, indeed, wholly impossible – for George Clinton to have had access to such precise franchise data at the time he penned Cato V in the waning months of 1787. No doubt he knew – inasmuch as anyone can know a common maxim to be true – that the House of Commons was at that time plagued by corruption and underrepresentation. It might also be taken as a given that anything he wrote which seemed to favor the model of representative government then practiced in Great Britain did not constitute a tacit endorsement of the accompanying institutional deficits which continued to plague that selfsame system. Clinton’s evident intention, far from recommending every aspect of the House of Commons as a guide for the modification of the Congress described by the proposed constitution, rather seemed to be on the order of pointing up one aspect in particular. Great Britain, it was true, possessed a substantially larger population circa 1787 than did the United States of America, thereby logically indicating that the number of MPs in the House of Commons was bound to exceed the same count of Representatives in the lower house of Congress. But while there were indeed more MPs than Representatives, there were also more MPs per person in all of Britain than there was bound to be Representatives per person in all of the United States. Why should this have been the case? Notwithstanding the disparities which existed between one riding and the next, why was the British government so generous in terms of elected representation while the American government described by the proposed constitution promised to be so stingy?

Clinton naturally thought he had answers to these questions. It was his evident belief that the Framers of the proposed constitution had made a point of allocating relatively few Representatives per citizen – “The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand,” read Article I, Section 2 of the document in question – so that the officers in question would be, “Too few to resist the influence of corruption, and the temptation of treachery.” While such suspicion is perhaps not all that surprising – some people being naturally distrustful of power, and Clinton in particular having a fair bit to lose in the event that his home state became suddenly subject to an empowered and ambitious Congress – neither it is precisely explicable. That is to say, though Clinton’s tendency to distrust the motivations of the Framers is more or less in keeping with what we know about his character and interests, it would be impossible to say for certain why he believed that the Framers specifically intended for the House of Representatives to be especially vulnerable to corruption. What does seem to bear examination, however, are certain of the implications of Clinton’s all-but-stated belief that more representation was always preferable to less, and that greater the number of representatives there are the less the body to which they belong is susceptible to being compromised. While the intervening centuries have not necessarily proven the author of Cato V to be entirely wrong in holding to these convictions, they have certainly added their share of complications. To place Clinton’s remarks in their proper context, therefore, it would seem necessary to engage with the dimensions of representative government whose existence he could not have predicted as well as with those of which he believed himself especially well apprised.