The correct answer to this open question is the following.
Although there are no options attached, we can say the following.
The big idea of this quote Oliver Ellsworth is the following.
Oliver was a delegate from Connecticut, and he was participating in the Federal Constitutional Convention to create the new Constitution of the United States.
Delegates were debating the difficult issue of representation of each state in Congress when he said "We were partly national, partly federal. The proportional representation in the first branch was conformable to the national principle and would secure the large States against the small. An equality of voices was conformable to the federal principle, and was necessary to secure the small States against the large."
He was referring to the issue of the number of representatives in the legislative branch for each state, considering that larger states could have a clear advantage over the small states. He tried to support the idea that the states would not have an equal vote in the House of Representatives. Oliver considered that small states had to be protected in some way by the larger states that had more people living in those states.
