The other states will sympathize with the delinquent state; they will feel that the very same condition of things which leads you to attack that state to-day will lead you to attack some other state to-morrow. Hence you cannot get any military help, and you are powerless. Such was the case with the Continental Congress. A novel and distrusted institution, it was called upon to enforce its laws upon long-established communities, full of sturdy independence and obstinate local prejudices. It was able to act, though with clumsy slowness, as long as there was an enemy in the field who was even more dreaded. But as soon as this enemy had been beaten out of sight it could not act at all. This had been because it did not represent the American people, but only the American states. The vital force which moved it was not the resistless force of a whole people, but only a shadowy semblance of force, derived from a theoretical consent of thirteen corporate bodies, which in their corporate capacity could never be compelled to agree about anything under the sun; and unless compelled they would not agree. Four years of disturbance in every part of the country, in the course of which troops had been called out in several states, and civil war had been narrowly averted at least half a dozen times, had proved this beyond all cavil. With almost any other people than the Americans civil war would have come already. With all the vast future interests that were involved in these quarrels looming up before their keen, sagacious minds, it was a wonder that they had been kept from coming to blows. Such self-restraint had been greatly to their credit. It was the blessed fruit of more than a century of government by free discussion, while yet these states were colonies, peopled by the very cream of English freemen who had fought the decisive battle of civil and religious freedom for mankind in that long crisis when the Invincible Armada was overwhelmed and the Long Parliament won its triumphs. Such self-restraint had this people shown in days of trial, under a vicious government adopted in a time of hurry and sore distress. But late events had gone far to show that it could not endure.