It has been attempted to show in a previous chapter that the spirit of independence in the American colonies, which in the end was embodied in political severance from Great Britain, was as old as their origin, and drew its strength from the fact that they had always been practically independent. This was the starting-point of the Chief Justice’s argument. ‘All America,’ in his words, ‘was, at the very outset of the plantations, abandoned to democracy’, and the separate colonies which at the time when he wrote, had been federated into the United States, were ‘little Republics’. Those little Republics, according to the ordinary colonial contention, the mother country had neglected in the weakness of their infancy, while she had tried to oppress them when they became prosperous and valuable. Chief Justice Smith read history differently. According to his view they were quiet until they had grown to strength, and then they discovered that the ultimate power of government rested with themselves and not with the mother country. The remedy, he thought, should have been found not so much by giving greater power to the Imperial Government as by establishing in America itself an authority controlling the separate Assemblies of the separate states, which body would have been a ‘Partner in the legislation of the Empire’. [Sidenote: The grounds on which Chief Justice Smith advocated a General Legislature for British North America.] It was no new conception that the states should have been in some sense federated while still under the British flag. Various governors, and men like Franklin, had proposed or contemplated some such measure, in order to correct the weakness of the separate provinces as against the common foe in Canada, while Canada belonged to France, and in order to minimize the difficulties which the Imperial Government found in dealing with a number of separate legislatures at least as jealous of each other as they were of the Home Government. But the Chief Justice’s retrospect was based on somewhat different grounds. He would have had a federal legislature in order to control the provincial legislatures. He would have corrected democracy in America by, in a sense, carrying democracy further. He would have nothing of the maxim _divide et impera_; but, as democracy was born on American soil, on American soil he would have constituted a popular authority wider, wiser, and stronger than the bodies which represented the single provinces. It was a very statesmanlike view. He saw that one leading cause of the rupture between Great Britain and her colonies had been the pettiness of the American democracies, the narrowness of provincial politics, the intensity of democratic feeling cooped up in the small area of a single colony as in a single Greek city, the personal bitterness thereby produced in local politicians, and the obvious semblance of oppression when a great country like England was dealing with one small state and another, not with a