I dwell on this point in order to emphasise the truth, vital to any intelligent appreciation of the great change now impending in the administration of public affairs in the United States, that the commonwealths by which the American Union was established were, from the first, in the opinion of their inhabitants, sufficient each unto itself; and this because each of these commonwealths was indeed a well-organised body politic, the members of which had long managed their domestic affairs under one or another form of chartered authority, after their own fashion; and, for the protection within their own borders of life and of property, had adjusted to their several situations and necessities the maxims and principles of English liberty defined and guarded by law. These States were the creators, not the creatures of that “more perfect Union” which (the Confederacy of 1778 failing) was finally formed by them after all its features had been discussed, debated, and redebated, not only in a Convention of the States assembled for that purpose in 1787, but in the several States subsequently, with a fulness, vigor of thought, and intelligence which, in the opinion of others than my own countrymen, make the volumes of Elliott’s _Debates on the Constitution_ the most valuable treasury of constitutional politics in existence. The framers of the American Constitution of 1789 were no rude uninstructed settlers, summoned from the axe and the plough to improvise an orderly government. The traditions of the older States went back to the struggle between the prerogative and the taxpayers of England under the Stuart kings. Virginia, the “Old Dominion” of Elizabeth and the Restoration, with her Established Church, her College of William and Mary, and her legends of the Cavaliers, was in no hurry to believe that her consequence could be much enhanced by any merger of her sovereignty in that of a federal union with Charles the Second’s Crown colony of Rhode Island, and with the gallant little community which keeps green on the banks of the Delaware the memory of the self-sacrificing and heroic Thomas West. The colonial story of the great central State of New York had made its sturdy people familiar with those ideas of federated liberty on which the fabric of Netherlandish independence had been founded. The curious in such matters have found an indication of the extent to which the spirit of the Netherlands influenced the framers of the new American republic in the fact that when the style and title to be taken by the American President were under consideration, Washington inclined to the notion that the Chief Magistrate should be addressed and known as “His High Mightiness.” Nor were the citizens of the youngest of the colonies disposed to put the control of their persons and their purses unreservedly into the hands of any imperial central authority.