and so essential to its healthy growth.
It provided that complete religious freedom and equality which we now
accept as part of the order of nature, but which were then unknown in
any important European nation. It guaranteed the civil liberty of all
citizens. It provided for an indissoluble Union, a Union which should
grow until it could relentlessly crush nullification and secession; for
the States founded under it were the creatures of the Nation, and were
by the compact declared forever inseparable from it.

New Method of Creating Colonies.

In one respect the ordinance marked a new departure of the most radical
kind. The adoption of the policy therein outlined has worked a complete
revolution in the way of looking at new communities formed by
colonization from the parent country. Yet the very completeness of this
revolution to a certain extent veils from us its importance. We cannot
realize the greatness of the change because of the fact that the change
was so great; for we cannot now put ourselves in the mental attitude
which regarded the old course as natural. The Ordinance of 1787 decreed
that the new States should stand in every respect on an equal footing
with the old; and yet should be individually bound together with them.
This was something entirely new in the history of colonization. Hitherto
every new colony had either been subject to the parent state, or
independent of it. England, Holland, France, and Spain, when they
founded colonies beyond the sea, founded them for the good of the parent
state, and governed them as dependencies. The home country might treat
her colonies well or ill, she might cherish and guard them, or oppress
them with harshness and severity, but she never treated them as equals.
Russia, in pushing her obscure and barbarous conquest and colonization
of Siberia,--a conquest destined to be of such lasting importance in the
history of Asia,--pursued precisely the same course.

In fact, this had been the only kind of colonization known to modern
Europe. In the ancient world it had also been known, and it was only
through it that great empires grew. Each Roman colony that settled in
Gaul or Iberia founded a city or established a province which was
tributary to Rome, instead of standing on a footing of equality in the
same nation with Rome. But the other great colonizing peoples of
antiquity, the Greeks and Phoenicians, spread in an entirely different
way. Each of their colonies beca