There would be no justice in presenting even an outline of the American Revolution, without referring to its triumphs of statesmanship and diplomacy, as well as its triumphs of military achievement. Washington, Greene, Stark, Putnam, Wayne, Lafayette, De Kalb, Steuben, Schuyler, and their fellow-soldiers, performed a great part, and that which was the most brilliant and conspicuous, in accomplishing our liberties. But in the Congress were patriots quite as devoted, and not less efficient; while Franklin, during his sojourn abroad, exercised with great skill the delicate and subtle generalship of diplomacy. It would have been easy for the statesmen of the Revolution to render all of Washington's efforts vain and futile. The triumph of unworthy ambitions in the colonial counsels might well have brought wreck and ruin upon the cause. [Sidenote: Revolutionary Statesmanship.] Had the revolutionary statesmen lacked capacity or courage, they would have loaded the army with a burden which it probably could not have supported. The marvel of the period was the almost undisturbed unity, readiness, and practical energy of every branch of the public service; the devotion of each one in his own sphere to the common end; the general co-operation in the means by which that end was to be reached; the remarkable rarity of treason, even of self-seeking; the steadfast exercise, amid the comfortlessness of camps and the temptations of the council-hall of the highest and worthiest public virtues. VIII. THE CONFEDERATION AND CONSTITUTION. [Sidenote: The Confederation.] [Sidenote: Bond of the States.] The Confederation was designed as a temporary civil machine, with which to conduct a war common to the colonies. The Constitution was the later and permanent bond, combining the States under a single government. Without the confederation, there would have been chaos in the revolution; without the constitution, there would have remained the weakness arising from the division and rivalry of States. It is most interesting to observe the gradual manner in which our civil government crystallized out of the original elements offered by the colonies; and it is wonderful to see with what wise deliberation and patriotic earnestness States differing so widely in manners, in religion, in colonial system, and even in blood and race, were brought together in harmonious coalition, bound with a bond which the greatest civil war of modern times failed to sever, and which it seems only to have confirmed and strengthened. [Sidenote: Early Confederations.]