thinkers in such matters, they were also relieved to a remarkable degree from prejudices in favour of the political institutions amid which they had been trained. In the first glow of revolutionary enthusiasm the traditional institutions of England had been quietly ignored, and in forming their first Confederation the original thirteen States almost without argument constituted a single House of Congress, and, quite ignoring monarchical associations, appointed an Executive Committee to carry on the government at such times as the Congress was not in Session.

Nevertheless, the past was not to be amputated in this summary way. The tradition that property, land, and rank, were to be weighed against man in representation, which had given to England its House of Lords and its representative knights of shires in the House of Commons, had survived in the first union formed by the Puritans of New England. There we find the government consisting of delegates from congregations of pilgrims settled in different centres, each of these congregations having an equal number of votes, whatever their relative size. And when in place of these congregations there stood thirteen States, several

of them hardly larger than some counties in the others, they based their Confederation on the assumed sanctity of the state survey-lines. Rhode Island must cast the same number of votes in congress as New York!

How were these States formed? Why was New York large and Rhode Island small? Why should not the American people have partitioned out their territory into a convenient number of districts?

The States had been developed from various historic centres, and although their interests were, certainly at that time, identical, and their boundaries scarcely defined, the local sentiment was as yet quite too strong for the formation of a large and earnest nationality. The union they did frame was not one of sympathy, but one formed under the sense of separate weakness in presence of a foreign enemy. Its brief duration showed that the State was everything, the solidarity of the people nothing; and after a life enfeebled by inter-state jealousies, its inharmonious existence terminated.

This feeling of the sanctity of state-lines was itself strangely tinged with superstition; at least, it seems to have been originally due more to

hereditary notions than to any positive differences of interest. While it gave each State one vote in the Congress, the republican principle had to be satisfied with the right of States to send a larger or less number of delegates in proportion to their population, this variation of power being strictly limited to talking.

The emphasis given to geographical and local patriotism was gradually productive of separate interests. And when these began to bear heavily upon the bond which united the first Confederation-a bond already weakened as the apprehensions of foreign invasion which had formed it began to vanish-it broke asunder. The weakness that proved fatal was the absence of any sufficient central authority, which was but the counterpart of the preponderant provincial pride and local selfishness euphemistically called state sovereignty or state-independence.

III.

It was under these circumstances that the ablest men in America were appointed by the several States to meet together and devise some means of

so amending the articles of the Confederation as to form a national union.

From the first it was evident that the one great problem they had to solve was how to harmonise the feeling of state-independence with the purposes of a general government sufficiently strong to make a real nation. Some of the truest and wisest statesmen saw and declared that the only means of securing a real union was to abolish the States, and partition the territory into districts based on population, and changeable with its subsequent growth or variation. They proposed that these districts should have their local assemblies to deal with clearly defined classes of local interests, and that they should be represented in one national legislative Chamber.

Had their insight guided the majority of the Convention, it is needless to say that it would have saved the United States from the long and shameful reign of slavery, and from the fearful civil war in which that reign reached its climax and its end.

But those who held these views were very few, and they only suggested their views with bated breath; for it was plain that the States were jealous of their so-called sovereignty, though it is certain that they never really had any separate

sovereignty, having previously been dependencies of Great Britain and having achieved a common independence as united colonies.

ment.

The struggle in the Constitutional Convention turned practically upon no such radical project as the extinction or modification of the existing States, but upon their relative power in the new GovernThe strength of State jealousy was naturally strongest in the smallest ones, and a representative of the most insignificant of these declared in the Convention, that his State would offer its hand to a foreign power, if it were sought to bind its will by the controlling power of the larger States.

The result was a compromise. It was finally agreed that in the new union there should be, as it were, a double set of States. The old historical colonies should remain to continue their idea that the soil within their survey-lines was more sacred than any outside of them, and that a system of governors, legislatures, and courts should be built up upon these; also that they should own a special branch of Congress, the Senate, in which each State should have an equal number of delegates, and an equal vote, whatever might be the differences