point. This was Lansing, who referred to it in a speech directed against the generally nationalistic features of the Virginia plan. It was intolerable, he said, that a gentleman from Georgia should assume to judge the expediency of a law which was to operate in New Hampshire. "Such a Negative would be more injurious than that of Great Britain heretofore was."[1]
Madison's final view of the matter is shown in the familiar memorandum on the "Origin of the Constitutional Convention", written shortly before his death, in which he refers to his early proposals, "suggested by the negative in the head of the British Empire, which prevented collisions between the parts and the whole, and between the parts themselves".
It was supposed [he adds] that the substitution, of an elective and responsible authority for an hereditary and irresponsible one, would avoid the appearance even of a departure from the principle of Republicanism. But altho' the subject was so viewed in the Convention, and the votes on it were more than once equally divided, it was finally and justly abandoned, as apart from other objections it was not practicable among so many states increasing in number and enacting each of them so many laws.[2]
Though federal control of state legislation was finally secured in another way, the whole debate shows how the sense of responsibility for general interests influenced American ways of thinking about imperial problems. Men like Samuel Adams, or Patrick Henry, clinging persistently to his "darling word requisitions",[3] might continue to think in the terms of 1776, but the leaders who wrestled with confederation problems during and after the war understood, in some measure at least, the attitude of British administrators when confronted with the stubborn localism of a provincial assembly.
Maximum Prices in France in 1793 and 1794
The measures adopted by the German imperial government for the control of food prices and the fair distribution of supplies, together with the recent legislation on the same subject in the United States, give a fresh interest to similar experiments in France, when that country was confronted by a world of enemies in 1793 and 1794. An adequate examination of certain aspects of the French experience with maximum prices has now been made pos-
