Taught by these events that a more effective union was necessary to the deliverance of the country from a foreign yoke, the States at length united in the establishment of a government, the leading purpose of which was mutual defence against external attacks, and called it a Confederation. But its powers were so restricted, and its operations so clogged and impeded by State jealousies and State reservations of power, that it lacked entirely the means of providing the sinews of war out of the resources of the country, and was driven to foreign loans and foreign arms for the means of bringing that war to a close. A vast load of debt was thus accumulated upon the country; and, as soon as peace was established, it became apparent, that, while the Confederation was a government with the power of contracting debts, it was without the power of paying them. This incapacity revealed the existence of great objects of government, without which the people of the several States could never prosper, and which, in their separate capacities, the States themselves could never accomplish. Now it is as certain as history can make any thing, that the whole period, from the commencement of the war to the end of the Confederation, was a period of great suffering to the people of the United States. The trials and hardships of war were succeeded by the greater trials and hardships of a time of peace, in which the whole nation experienced that greatest of all social evils, the want of an efficient and competent government. There was a gloom upon the minds of men,--a sense of insecurity,--a consciousness that American society was not fulfilling the ends of its being by the development of its resources and the discharge of its obligations,--which constituted altogether a discipline and a chastisement of the whole nation, and which we are not at liberty to regard as the mere accidents of a world ungoverned by an overruling Power. It was from the midst of that discipline that the American people came to the high undertaking of forming for themselves a constitution, by which to work out the destiny of social life in this Western World. Had they essayed their task after years of prosperity, and after old institutions and old forms of government had, upon the whole, yielded a fair amount of success and happiness, they would have wanted that power which comes only from failure and disappointment,--the power to adapt the best remedy to the deepest social defects, and to lay hold on the future with the strength given by the hard teachings of the past.