by men who brought along with them the seeds of self-government, and a living common law, instinct with the principles of manly self-dependence and civil freedom. The charters under which they settled, and which divided the American territory iuto colonies, were of little more importance than the vessels and their names in which the settlers crossed the Atlantic; nor had the origin of these charters a deep meaning, nor was their source always pure. The people in this country always felt themselves to be one people, and unitedly they proclaimed and achieved their independence. The country as a whole was called by Washington and his compeers America, for nant of a more individual name. Still, there was no outward and legal bond between tire colonies, except the crown of England; and when our people abjured their allegiance to that crown, each colony stood formally for itself. The Articles of Confederation were adopted,, by which our forefathers attempted to establish a confederacy, uniting all that felt themselves to be of one nation, but were not one by outward legal form. It was the best united government our forefathers could think of, or of which, perhaps, the combination of circumstances admitted. Each colony came gradually to be called a State, and called itself sovereign, although none of them had ever exercised any of the highest attributes of sovereignty; nor did ever after the States do so. Wherever political societies are leagued together, be it by the frail bonds of a pure confederacy, or by the consciousness of the people that they are intrinsically one people, and form one nation, without, however, a positive National Government, , then the most powerful of these ill-united portions needs must rule and, as always more than one portion wishes to be the leader, intestine struggles ensue in all such incoherent governments. It has been so in antiquity ; it has been so in the middle ages; it has been so, and is so in modern times. Athens and Sparta, Castile and Aragon, Austria and Prussia, are always jealous companions, readily turned into bitter enemies. Those of our forefathers who later became the framers of our Constitution, saw this approaching evil, and they observed many other ills which had already overtaken the confederacy. Even Washing- ington, the strong and tenacious patriot, nearly desponded. It was a dark period in our history; and it was then that our fathers most boldly, yet most considerately, performed the greatest act that our annals record —they engrafted a national, complete and representative government on our insufficient confederacy ; a government with an exclusively National executive, in which the Senate, though still representing the States as States, became Nationalized in a great measure, and in which the House of Representatives became purely National like the Executive. Virginia, which, under the Articles of Confederation, was approaching the leadership Over all (in the actual assumption of which she would have been resisted by other rapidly growing states, which would inevitably have led to her Peloponnesian war)—Virginia was now represented according to her population, like every other portion of the country; not as a unit, but by a number of representatives who were bound to vote individually, according to their consciences, as National men. The danger of internal struggle and provincial bitterness had passed, and our country now fairly entered as an equal among the leading nations in the course, where
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