meetings, and the larger State [_sic_],
Massachusetts, superior to all the rest in territory, wealth, and
population, had no greater number of votes than New Haven. But the
commissioners were in reality little more than a deliberative body; they
possessed no executive power, and, while they could decree a war and a
levy of troops, it remained for the States to carry their votes into
effect."[36]

This confederacy continued in existence for nearly fifty years. Between
that period and the year 1774, when the first Continental Congress met
in Philadelphia, several other temporary and provisional associations of
colonies had been formed, and the people had been taught the advantages
of union for a common purpose; but they had never abandoned or
compromised the great principle of community independence. That form of
self-government, generated in the German forests before the days of the
Caesars, had given to that rude people a self-reliance and patriotism
which first checked the flight of the Roman eagles, which elsewhere had
been the emblem of their dominion over the known world. This
principle--the great preserver of all communal freedom and of mutual
harmony--was transplanted by the Saxons into England, and there
sustained those personal rights which, after the fall of the Heptarchy,
were almost obliterated by the encroachments of Norman despotism; but,
having the strength and perpetuity of truth and right, were reasserted
by the mailed hands of the barons at Runnymede for their own benefit and
that of their posterity. Englishmen, the early settlers, brought this
idea to the wilds of America, and it found expression in many forms
among the infant colonies.

Mr. Edward Everett, in his Fourth-of-July address, delivered in New York
in 1861, following the lead of Judge Story, and with even less caution,
boldly declares that, "before their independence of England was
asserted, they [the colonies] constituted _a provincial people_." To
sustain this position--utterly contrary to all history as it is--he is
unable to adduce any valid American authority, but relies almost
exclusively upon loose expressions employed in debate in the British
Parliament about the period of the American Revolution--such as "that
people," "that loyal and respectable people," "this enlightened and
spirited people," etc., etc. The speakers who made use of this
colloquial phraseology concerning the inhabitants of a distant
continent, in the freedom of e