Of that strife the victorious combatant had been Britain.  She had conquered the provinces of France.  She had expelled her rival totally from the continent, over which, bounding herself by the Mississippi, she was thenceforth to hold divided empire only with Spain.  She had acquired undisputed control over the Indian tribes still tenanting the forests unexplored by the European man.  She had established an uncontested monopoly of the commerce of all her colonies.  But forgetting all the warnings of preceding ages—­ forgetting the lessons written in the blood of her own children, through centuries of departed time, she undertook to tax the people of the colonies without their consent.

Resistance, instantaneous, unconcerted, sympathetic, inflexible resistance, like an electric shock, startled and roused the people of all the English colonies on this continent.

This was the first signal of the North American Union, The struggle was for chartered rights—­for English liberties—­for the cause of Algernon Sidney and John Hampden—­for trial by jury—­the Habeas Corpus and Magna Charta.

But the English lawyers had decided that Parliament was omnipotent—­and Parliament, in its omnipotence, instead of trial by jury and the Habeas Corpus, enacted admiralty courts in England to try Americans for offenses charged against them as committed in America; instead of the privileges of Magna Charta, nullified the charter itself of Massachusetts Bay; shut up the port of Boston; sent armies and navies to keep the peace and teach the colonies that John Hampden was a rebel and Algernon Sidney a traitor.

English liberties had failed them.  From the omnipotence of Parliament the Colonists appealed to the rights of man and the omnipotence of the God of battles.  Union!  Union! was the instinctive and simultaneous cry throughout the land.  Their congress, assembled at Philadelphia, once—­twice—­had petitioned the king; had remonstrated to Parliament; had addressed the people of Britain, for the rights of Englishmen—­in vain.  Fleets and armies, the blood of Lexington, and the fires of Charlestown and Falmouth, had been the answer to petition, remonstrance, and address. ...

The dissolution of allegiance to the British crown, the severance of the colonies from the British empire, and their actual existence as independent States, were definitively established in fact, by war and peace.  The independence of each separate State had never been declared of right.  It never existed in fact.  Upon the principles of the Declaration of Independence, the dissolution of the ties of allegiance, the assumption of sovereign power, and the institution of civil government, are all acts of transcendent authority, which the people alone are competent to perform; and, accordingly, it is in the name and by the authority of the people, that two of these acts—­the dissolution of allegiance, with the severance from the British empire, and the declaration of the United Colonies, as free and independent States, were performed by that instrument.