"The state of Pennsylvania is far from being one of the best governed of the members of the confederation. The government is without force; nor can it be otherwise. A popular government can never have any whilst the people are uncertain and vacillating in their opinions; for then the leaders seek rather to please than to serve them, and end by becoming the slaves of the multitude whom they pretended to govern." This constitution had one capital defect: it provided only for a single legislative chamber. After a disastrous trial, Pennsylvania was {190} compelled to change her laws, and adopt the system of two chambers, like the other states of the Union. Our author betrays his misgivings most clearly in his narrative of an interview with Samuel Adams. His report of the conversation is especially curious, as it shows how entirely the two speakers were preoccupied by different ideas. Samuel Adams, who has been called "the American Cato," bent himself to prove the revolution justifiable, by arguments drawn not only from natural right but from historical precedent. The thoroughly English character of mind of these innovators led them to make it a sort of point of honor to find a sanction for their conduct in tradition. M. de Chastellux, like a true Frenchman, made no account of such reasonings. "I am clearly of opinion that the parliament of England had no right to tax America without her consent; but I am still more clearly convinced that, when a whole people say, 'We will be free!' it is difficult to demonstrate that they are in the wrong. Be that as it may, Mr. Adams very satisfactorily proved to me that New England was peopled with no view to commerce and aggrandizement, but wholly by individuals who fled from persecution, and sought an asylum at the extremity of the world, where they might be free to live and follow their own opinions; that it was of their own accord that these colonists placed themselves under the protection of England; that the mutual relationship springing from this connection was expressed in their charters, and that the right of imposing or exacting a revenue of any kind was not comprised in them." There was no question between the two speakers of the Federal Constitution, for it did not yet exist. The states at that time formed merely a confederation of sovereign states, with a general congress, like the German confederation. They had no president or central administration. The constitutions spoken of in this conversation were simply the separate constitutions of the individual states, and Samuel Adams, being from Massachusetts, referred particularly to that state. M. de Chastellux, accustomed to the complex social systems of Europe, was surprised that no property qualification should be required of voters; the Americans, on the contrary, who had always lived in a democratic community, both before and since the declaration of independence, could not comprehend the necessity of such a restriction.