Why this difference? It did not always exist. It cost New York and Massachusetts as severe a struggle to accept the Constitution of 1787 as it did Virginia. George Clinton, Governor of New York, had as much State pride as Patrick Henry, orator of Virginia, and parted as reluctantly with a portion of the sovereignty which he wielded. If it required Washington's influence and Madison's persuasive reasoning to bring Virginia into the new system, the repugnance of Massachusetts was only overcome by the combined force of Hancock's social rank and Samuel Adams's late, reluctant assent. On this subject let us hear Samuel Adams for a moment as he wrote to a friend in 1788:-- "I confess, as I enter the building I stumble at the threshold. I meet with a national government instead of a federal union of sovereign states. I am not able to conceive why the wisdom, of the Convention led them to give the preference to the former before the latter. If the several States in the Union are to be one entire nation under one Legislature, the powers of which shall extend to every subject of legislation, and its laws be supreme and control the whole, the idea of sovereignty in these States must be lost. Indeed, I think, upon such a supposition, those sovereignties ought to be eradicated from the mind, for they would be _imperia in imperio_, justly deemed a solecism in politics, and they would be highly dangerous and destructive of the peace, union, arid safety of the nation.