Washington accepted this difficult trust: and he soon found a new obstacle to surmount, a new danger to remove. No bond of union, no central power, had hitherto united the colonies. Each one having been founded and governed separately, each, on its own account, providing for its own safety, for its public works, for its most trifling as well as most important affairs, they had contracted habits of isolation and almost of rivalship, which the distrustful mother country had taken pains to foster. In their relations to each other, even ambition and the desire of conquest insinuated themselves, as if the States had been foreign to each other; the most powerful ones sometimes attempted to absorb the neighboring establishments, or to deprive them of their authority; and in their most important interest, the defence of their frontiers against the savages, they often followed a selfish course of policy, and mutually abandoned one another. {47} It was a most arduous task to combine at once, into one system, elements which had hitherto been separated, without holding them together by violence, and, while leaving them free, to induce them to act in concert under the guidance of one and the same power. The feelings of individuals no less than public institutions, passions as well as laws, were opposed to this result. The colonies wanted confidence in each other. All of them were jealous of the power of Congress, the new and untried rival of the local assemblies; they were still more jealous of the army, which they regarded as being, at the same time, dangerous to the independence of the States and to the liberty of the citizens. Upon this point, new and enlightened opinions were in unison with popular feeling. The danger of standing armies, and the necessity, in free countries, of perpetually resisting and diminishing their power, their influence, and the contagion of their morals, was one of the favorite maxims of the eighteenth century. {48} Nowhere, perhaps, was this maxim more generally or more warmly received than in the colonies of America. In the bosom of the national party, those who were the most ardent, the most firmly resolved to carry on the contest with vigor and to the end, were also the most sensitive friends of civil liberty; that is to say, these were the men, who looked upon the army, a military spirit, military discipline, with the most hostile and suspicious eye. Thus it happened, that obstacles were met with precisely in that quarter in which it was natural to look for, and to expect to find, the means of success.