pride" is really not known in the Northern
States. All men of every land are fond of their native place; but the
pride that Northern people may feel in the State wherein they happened
to be born is as subordinate to their national feeling, as the
attachment of a Frenchman to his native province is to his pride in
France.

Why this difference? It did not always exist. It cost New York and
Massachusetts as severe a struggle to accept the Constitution of 1787
as it did Virginia. George Clinton, Governor of New York, had as much
State pride as Patrick Henry, orator of Virginia, and parted as
reluctantly with a portion of the sovereignty which he wielded. If it
required Washington's influence and Madison's persuasive reasoning to
bring Virginia into the new system, the repugnance of Massachusetts
was only overcome by the combined force of Hancock's social rank and
Samuel Adams's late, reluctant assent.

On this subject let us hear Samuel Adams for a moment as he wrote to a
friend in 1788:--

"I confess, as I enter the building I stumble at the
threshold. I meet with a national government instead of a
federal union of sovereign states. I am not able to conceive
why the wisdom, of the Convention led them to give the
preference to the former before the latter. If the several
States in the Union are to be one entire nation under one
Legislature, the powers of which shall extend to every
subject of legislation, and its laws be supreme and control
the whole, the idea of sovereignty in these States must be
lost. Indeed, I think, upon such a supposition, those
sovereignties ought to be eradicated from the mind, for they
would be _imperia in imperio_, justly deemed a solecism in
politics, and they would be highly dangerous and destructive
of the peace, union, arid safety of the nation.

"And can this National Legislature be competent to make laws
for the _free_ internal government of one people, living in
climates so remote, and whose habits and particular
interests are, and probably always will be, so different? Is
it to be expected that general laws can be adapted to the
feelings of the more eastern and the more southern parts of
so extensive a nation? It appears to me difficult, if
practicable. Hence, then, may we not look for discontent,
mistrust, disaffection to government, and frequent
insurrections, wh