"On application of the legislature or executive, as the case may be, the militia of the other States are to be called to suppress domestic insurrections. Does this bar the States from calling forth their own militia? No; but it gives them a supplementary security to suppress insurrections and domestic violence."
CHAPTER XIV.
THE CONSTITUTION ACCORDING TO THE PRACTICE OF THE GOVERNMENT.
Uniform practice under a law is one of the highest proofs of the meaning of that law.
Apportionment of Representatives. (Const. Art. 1, sec. 2.)
The Constitution (Art. 1, sec. 2, par. 3) provides that the enumeration of the people of the United States (upon which the apportionment of representatives and direct taxes was to be made) "shall be made within three years after the first meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent term of ten years, in such manner as they shall by law direct."
On the 1st of March, 1790, George Washington, who had been president of the Convention which framed the Constitution, approved "an Act providing for the enumeration of the inhabitants of the United States." The first Congress ever assembled, and the first President ever elected, under the Constitution, under the sanction of their respective oaths "to support the Constitution," by this Act expressed their deliberate judgment as to the true meaning of the people of the United States in adopting this section of the Constitution. What, in their judgment, was such meaning?
These extracts from the Act will suffice (Act 1790, chap. 29):—