CHAP. V. June Virginia lost the opportunity of being the ninth state to constitute the union. While the long winter 1788. of New Hampshire intercepted the labors of hus25. bandry, the fireside of the freeholders in its hundreds of townships became the scene for discussing the merits of the federal constitution with the delegates of their choice and with one another. Their convention reassembled in June. Four days served them to discuss the constitution, to prepare and recommend twelve articles of amendment, and, by fifty-seven 21. voices against forty-six, to ratify the constitution. They took care to insert in their record that their vote was taken on Saturday, the twenty-first of June, at one o'clock in the afternoon, that Virginia by a vote at a later hour of the same day might not dispute with them the honor of giving life to the constitution.' By their decision, accompanied by that of Virginia, the United States of America came formally into existence. As the glad tidings flew through the land, the heart of its people thrilled with joy that at last the tree of union was firmly planted. Never may its trunk be riven by the lightning; nor its branches crash each other in the maddening storm; nor its beauty wither; nor its root decay. 1 Tobias Lear to Washington, 22 June, 1788. Letters to Washington, iv. 225. CHAPTER I. THE CONSTITUTION. 1787. I. "THE American constitution is the most wonderful CHAP. work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man;" but it had its forerunners. England had suffered the thirteen colonies, as free states, to make laws each for itself and never for one of the others; and had established their union in a tempered subordination to the British crown. Among the many guides of America, there had been Winthrop and Cotton, Hooker and Haynes, George Fox and William Penn, Roger Williams and John Clarke; scholars of Oxford and many more of Cambridge; Gustavus Adolphus and Oxenstiern; the merchants of the United Netherlands; Southampton and Baltimore, with the kindliest influences of the British aristocracy; Shaftesbury with Locke, for evil as well as for good; all the great slave-traders that sat on thrones or were fostered by parliament; and the philanthropist Oglethorpe, who founded a colony exclusively of the free on a territory twice as large 1787. CHAP. as France, and though he had to mourn at the overI. throw of his plans for liberty, lived to see his planta1787. tion independent. There were other precursors of the federal government; but the men who framed it followed the lead of no theoretical writer of their own or preceding times. They harbored no desire of revolution, no craving after untried experiments. They wrought from the elements which were at hand, and shaped them to meet the new exigencies which had arisen. The least possible reference was made by them to abstract doctrines; they moulded their design by a creative power of their own, but nothing was introduced that did not already exist, or was not a natural development of a well-known principle. The materials for building the American constitution were the gifts of the ages. Of old, the family was the rudiment of the state. Of the Jews, the organization was by tribes. The citizens of the commonwealths of the Hellenes were of one blood. Among the barbarous tribes of the fourth continent, the governments and the confederacies all rested on consanguinity. Nations, as the word implied, were but large communities of men of one kin; and nationalities survive to this day, a source of strength in their unity, and yet of strife, where they exist in their original separateness and are nev ertheless held in subjection under one ruler. Rome first learned to cherish the human race by a common name and transform the vanquished into citizens. The process of assimilation which Rome initiated by war, received its perfect development in the land |