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The original constitution had one representative for every 30,000 inhabitants, with slaves counting as 3/4 of a person, so the South wasn't screwed over in the original compromises that prevented dissolution of the union into separate states. It was looking like that was going to happen when the Articles of Confederation were not working well, and the nation set about to revise them (and got a constitution instead).
One for every 30,000 was fine for a small, primarily rural and agrarian, nation. One for every 30,000 would be the local elite in a typical small town today. It worked.
The size of the House grew as the nation grew, and eventually the number was fixed at 435 for the House by an act of law in the 1930s. I'm not sure its constitutional, but the Courts have seen fit to leave it alone.
Now, every member of Congress represents about 685,000 citizens, an impossible thing to do, as their constituents are too varied. The trade-off, however, is that if there were 9,933 House members (one for every 30,000 of our approximately 298 million citizens) then we would have a huge and inefficient legislature that wouldn't get stuff done. Then again, even that would be a trade-off of a trade-off, because inefficient legislatures mean bad laws don't get passed as well as good laws.
Practically every law passed this century has been bad, along with the majority of last century's laws. An inefficient Congress would have been a good thing.
I presume in the case of a war or national emergency, you'd want at least a semi-efficient Congress to fund important stuff and defund stuff to fund the emergency stuff.
But yea, I agree.
We'd get into a lot less wars, so this would be less important.