as a free and independent city carrying on its own political life, its questions, its disputes, perhaps its wars, with some fellow city; but all alike Greek, all glorying in the Hellenic name, all looking back to old Hellas as the motherland, each looking to its own mother-city, not with the dread of a subject, not with the helplessness of a child still in tutelage, but with the manly deference of a child of full age, whose reverence for his parent is none the less because he is no longer a member of the household. By way of contrast to that national life abiding in a new land, we see, in vast regions of the American continent, lands which once were English, which once were Spanish, which are still English and Spanish as far as common blood and speech and history can make them so, but which have ceased to be English or Spanish as political communities, and which grudgingly acknowledge the English or Spanish name. We see lands that parted in wrath from the motherland, and by whom the wrath of that parting has not wholly been forgotten. We see lands whose independence, instead of growing from the beginning with the good will of a watchful parent, has been won by the sword from the grasp of a parent who strove to keep her children in subjection. And all this has been the direct and necessary result of the theory of political life which the founders of those English and Spanish settlements carried with them. Subjects of a kingdom could do no otherwise; the theory of an allegiance which could never be cast aside obliged their settlements to become provinces, dependencies, whatever name is chosen, of the motherland. They could not found an independent kingdom any more than they could found an independent city. Dependence, tighter or slacker, was the necessity of the case. But it was no less in the necessity of the case that a day should come when even the slackest form of dependence could be borne no longer. That these colonies “are and ought to be free and independent states” was a voice which could not fail to be heard some day in Massachusetts and Virginia; there was no need for it ever to be heard in Syracuse or in Sybaris; for no man doubted their freedom and independence from the day of their first founding.