The Revolutionary wheel, which had begun to slow after the battle of Yorktown, now of course wholly stopped. The grist was ground. In it, it is true, were some hard colonels, some badly ground, dyspeptical grains, some dark specks; but, on the whole, the yield was good, unbolted American family flour. Of course the miller took toll. This came out in the shape of debts for soldiers’ wages, for money borrowed, for stores used, powder exploded, and pensions in the near distance; but still there was a broad country to gather it from, reaching westward to the Mississippi, northward to the Lakes, southward to the Gulf and Florida, and eastward to the Atlantic. There were independence achieved by obstinate bravery, right of government right to tax one’s self, and, above all, the right to spend one’s own taxes, even on useless officials and handsomely printed laws. And so, on the whole, the customer was well satisfied with his large, healthy, unbolted grist. CHAPTER V. HOW A POOR CONSTITUTION BROKE DOWN. Every Community has its Axis of Growth.—That of the Confederation described.—Causes of the Distrust of Federated Power.—How the States preferred to sew up the Treasury Pocket rather than allow their own Agents to put their Hands in it for necessary Funds.—Facetious Bills of Exchange.—The Shady and Sunny Side of Power.—Similarities and Dissimilarities of the States.—The Committee to draft Confederation Sixteen Months over the Cold Nest.—The curious Knot-ty Grub that issued.—The Spawn of Doubt put to the Nurse of Jealousy.—How it was nursed, starved, and doctored; and what a poor Constitution it got.—The Confederate Scheme like a Pine Board.—It could not raise Money, an Army, Credit, Postage, Revenue: in fact, could not raise itself.—The Comic Side of the Franking Privilege.—A desirable Prohibition.—How the Grub became a Caterpillar, and the Caterpillar a Butterfly.—A very Larky Phœnix rises, crowing Yankee Doodle. Every community, like every individual, has its axis of growth. Sometimes this axis is in the line of large, generous expansion, loving, trustful, and unselfish; sometimes on the crooked wire of involved, self-stunting contradictions, of twisting jealousies, and of resolutely resistant forces, which project crabwise on all sides, and propel with counteracting momentum in all directions, and so sprawl out either in balancing rest or in a slight gain rearward.