volutionists than
skill at arms, and that was union. Their only hope of successful
resistance against the might of England lay in concerted action, and
perhaps the most important result of the long war through which they had
been passing was the sense of union and of a common cause with which it
had inspired the thirteen colonies. This feeling was of course still
none too intense. But during the long war the colonies had drawn nearer
to one another than ever before. Soldiers from New Hampshire and North
Carolina, from Virginia and Massachusetts, bivouacked together, and
fought shoulder to shoulder. Colonial officers forgot local jealousies
in a common resentment of the contempt and neglect shown them all alike
by the haughty subalterns of the king. Mutual good-will was fostered by
the money and troops which the southern and less exposed colonies sent
to their sister commonwealths on the frontier. In these and numberless
minor ways a community of sentiment was engendered which, imperfect as
it was, yet prepared the way for that hearty co-operation which was to
carry the infant States through the fiery trial just before them.

It is important to remember, as well, not only that the war built up
this conviction of a common interest, but that nothing except the war
could have done it. The great forces of nineteenth-century
civilization--the locomotive, the telegraph, the modern daily
newspaper--which now bind sixty millions of people, spread over half a
continent, into one nation, were then unknown. The means of
communication and transportation between the colonies were very
primitive. Roads were rough, full of steeps and cuts, and in many
places, especially near cities, almost impassable with mire. It took
seven days to go by stage from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, four days
from Boston to New York. The mail service was correspondingly inadequate
and slow. At times in winter a letter would be five weeks in going from
Philadelphia to Virginia. The newspapers were few, contained little
news, and the circulation of each was necessarily confined to a very
limited area. It has been estimated that the reading-matter in all the
forty-three papers which existed at the close of the Revolution would
not fill ten pages of the New York Herald now. In connection with this
state of things consider the fact that the idea of colonial solidarity
had not then, as now, merely to be sustained. It had to be created
outright. Local pride and jea