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.