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Reflection On The Second Day Of The Convention

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The Second Day of the Convention, 1787
When I walked back into that hot, stuffy room of the convention I didn’t expect much, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that General Washington had taken a much more authoritative approach to his position. We had actually almost gotten past three agenda items, the first being how many representatives will be in each legislative house. As I mentioned in last night entry, I had proposed 1 representative for every 20,000 citizens. Although I knew what I wanted from the beginning, I wasn’t the first one called. The first proposal of the day, made by McHenry Wilson, was 1 representative per state. Meaning that there would be a grand total of 36 representatives for an entire nation, can you imagine? Mr. Butler 's proposal was …show more content…

It was time for a compromise. Mr. Washington took charge and grouped together all of our previous suggestions into 2; All Houses Have an Equal Amount of Representatives per State, and All Houses Have State Representatives Based off of Population. The two were shortened to “equal all” and “pop all”. In addition to equal and pop all there was the Butler compromise; one of the large houses have representatives based off of population, the other has 2 representatives per state, and the small house has representatives based off of capital. Personally I don 't think this makes sense at all, the smaller houses would be constantly changing as the economy fluctuates. And how much capital would equal a representative? No matter, thankfully there were 2 more compromises. The Randolph compromise; the two large houses would be population based, and the small house would be equal. And the Morris compromise. In my opinion, and the opinion of the majority, the Morris compromise was far superior to the others. It would have one of the large houses representing state interests with an equal amount of representatives throughout, and have the other two houses be based off of population.

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