By Richard Bammer
The so-called “Great Compromise” saved the Constitutional Convention, and, very likely, the Union. Written by Connecticut delegate Roger Sherman, it called for proportional representation in the House, and one representative per state in the Senate (later changed to two). The compromise passed 5 to 4, with one state, Massachusetts, “divided.”
And as it turned out, the word “democracy” does not appear at all in the Constitution, largely written by James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” a man who never earned a law degree but once said that, under the Constitution, the nation’s strengths will be “derived from the superior power of the people.”
Those facts may not be germane to the 2017 Solano County Essay Contest, open to all students countywide in grades seven to 12, but they may spark interest in some who try their hand at thinking and writing about the contest’s topic: