The reader, who has followed me through the preceding volume, has seen how the people of the United States, from the earliest stages of the Revolution, struggled to free themselves from these embarrassments;--how they commenced with a jealous reservation of State authority over all matters of commerce and revenue; how they undertook to supply the necessities of a central government by contributions which they had not the power to make good, because their commercial condition did not admit of heavy taxation; how they endeavored to pass from this system to a grant of temporary revenues and temporary commercial regulation, to be vested in the federal Union; how they found it impracticable to agree upon the principles and details of a temporary power; how they turned to separate commercial leagues, each with its immediate neighbors, and were disappointed in the result or frustrated in the effort; and how at last they came to the conception of a full and irrevocable surrender of commercial and fiscal regulations to a central legislature, that could grasp the interests of the whole country and combine them in one harmonious system. The influence of the commercial and revenue powers, thus obtained by the general government, on the condition of this country, has far exceeded the most sanguine hopes which the framers of the Constitution could have indulged. No one can doubt that the people of America owe to it both the nature and the degree of their actual prosperity;--and as the national prosperity has given them importance in the world, it is just and accurate to say, that commerce and its effects have elevated republican institutions to a dignity and influence which they have attained through no other of the forms or the spirit of society. Let the reader consider the interests of commerce, in their widest relations with all that they comprehend,--the interests of the merchant, the artisan, and the tiller of the soil being alike involved,--as the chief purpose of the new government given to this Union; let him contemplate this as the central object around which are arranged almost all the great provisions of the Constitution of the United States;--and he will see in it a wonderfully harmonious and powerful system, created for the security of property, and the promotion of the material welfare and prosperity of individuals, whatever their occupation, employment, or condition. That such a code of civil government should have sprung from the necessities of commerce, is surely one of the triumphs of modern civilization.