n
legislative bodies assumed their control, how much greater is the
insecurity of our personal interests if they are, as is assumed,
under the control of thirty-seven separate legislative bodies,
and subject to their constant revision?

The controversy soon based itself upon the security of human
rights. It was said that it "had ever been the pride and boast of
America that the rights for which she contended were the rights
of human nature," that "the citizens of the United States were
responsible for the greatest trust ever confided to a political
society," and that it was for "the people of the United States,
by whose will and for whose benefit the Federal Government was
instituted, to decide whether they would support their rank as a
Nation." Virginia and New York ultimately led in the proceeding
which caused the formation of the Constitution; New York, through
her Legislature, declaring that the radical source of the
government embarrassments lay in the want of sufficient power in
Congress, and she suggested a convention for the purpose of
establishing a firm National government. Out of this agitation
grew the Constitution of the United States, which was the third
great step in the centralization of power. The pride and the
boast of this country has been more fully centered, if possible,
on the Constitution than on the Declaration, and yet the
Constitution was not framed until eleven years after our
existence as a Nation--not ratified by the whole of the original
States until about fourteen years after we had taken rank as a
free and independent people--Rhode Island being the last State to
give her adherence--and it was expressly framed and adopted in
order to centralize power, and to destroy the State rights
doctrine.

Washington himself, in transmitting, as President of the
Convention, the Constitution to Congress, said: "It is obviously
impracticable in the Federal Government of these States to secure
all rights of independent sovereignty to each, and yet provide
for the interest and safety of all," and in the deliberations of
the Convention upon the subject, they kept steadily in view that
which appeared to them "the greatest of every true American--the
consolidation of our Union, in which is involved our prosperity,
safet