e various relations of the states to each other were to be
adjusted were not well understood. There was wide disagreement upon the
subject, and the attempt to compromise between opposing views was not at
first successful. Hence, in the management of affairs which concerned
the United States as a nation, we shall not find the central machinery
working smoothly or quietly. We are about to traverse a period of
uncertainty and confusion, in which it required all the political
sagacity and all the good temper of the people to save the half-built
ship of state from going to pieces on the rocks of civil contention.

CHAPTER III.

THE LEAGUE OF FRIENDSHIP.

[Sidenote: The several states have never enjoyed complete sovereignty.]

That some kind of union existed between the states was doubted by no
one. Ever since the assembling of the first Continental Congress in 1774
the thirteen commonwealths had acted in concert, and sometimes most
generously, as when Maryland and South Carolina had joined in the
Declaration of Independence without any crying grievances of their own,
from a feeling that the cause of one should be the cause of all. It has
sometimes been said that the Union was in its origin a league of
sovereign states, each of which surrendered a specific portion of its
sovereignty to the federal government for the sake of the common
welfare. Grave political arguments have been based upon this alleged
fact, but such an account of the matter is not historically true. There
never was a time when Massachusetts or Virginia was an absolutely
sovereign state like Holland or France. Sovereign over their own
internal affairs they are to-day as they were at the time of the
Revolution, but there was never a time when they presented themselves
before other nations as sovereign, or were recognized as such. Under the
government of England before the Revolution the thirteen commonwealths
were independent of one another, and were held together, juxtaposed
rather than united, only through their allegiance to the British crown.
Had that allegiance been maintained there is no telling how long they
might have gone on thus disunited; and this, it seems, should be one of
our chief reasons for rejoicing that the political connection with
England was dissolved when it was. A permanent redress of grievances,
and even virtual independence such as Canada now enjoys, we might
perhaps have gained had we listened to Lord North's proposals aft