he
represents--acquire in America something like the force of constitutional
law.

In this connection we must recall the period at which the earliest
settlers came from England, and the political heritage which they
consequently brought with them. This heritage included a certain
aptitude for local government, which was fostered in the south by the
rise of a class of large landowners and in the north by the
Congregational Church system. It included also a great tenacity of the
subject's rights as against the State--the spirit of Hampden refusing
payment of ship-money--and a disposition to look on the law and the
Courts as the bulwarks of such rights against Government. But it did not
include--and this explains the real meaning of the War of
Independence--any sort of feeling of allegiance to a Parliament which
represented Great Britain only, and which had gained its position even in
Great Britain since the fathers of Virginia and Massachusetts left home.
Nor did it include--and this was of great importance in its influence on
the form of the Constitution--any real understanding of or any aptitude
for the English Parliamentary Government, under which the leaders of the
legislative body and the advisers of the Crown in its executive functions
are the same men, and under which the elected persons, presumed for the
moment to represent the people, are allowed for that moment an almost
unfettered supremacy.

Thus there was much that made it easy for the Colonies to combine in the
single act of repudiating British sovereignty, yet the characteristics
which may be ascribed to them in common were not such as inclined them or
fitted them to build up a great new unity.

The Colonies, however, backed up by the British Government with the
vigour which Chatham imparted to it, had acted together against a common
danger from the French. When the States, as we must now call them, acted
together against the British Government they did so in name as "United
States," and they shortly proceeded to draw up "Articles of Confederation
and Perpetual Union." But it was union of a feeble kind. The separate
government of each State, in its internal affairs, was easy to provide
for; representative institutions always existed, and no more change was
needed than to substitute elected officers for the Governors and
Councillors formerly appointed by the Crown. For the Union a Congress
was provided which was to represent all the States in deal