In this connection we must recall the period at which the earliest settlers came from England, and the political heritage which they consequently brought with them.  This heritage included a certain aptitude for local government, which was fostered in the south by the rise of a class of large landowners and in the north by the Congregational Church system.  It included also a great tenacity of the subject’s rights as against the State—­the spirit of Hampden refusing payment of ship-money—­and a disposition to look on the law and the Courts as the bulwarks of such rights against Government.  But it did not include—­and this explains the real meaning of the War of Independence—­any sort of feeling of allegiance to a Parliament which represented Great Britain only, and which had gained its position even in Great Britain since the fathers of Virginia and Massachusetts left home.  Nor did it include—­and this was of great importance in its influence on the form of the Constitution—­any real understanding of or any aptitude for the English Parliamentary Government, under which the leaders of the legislative body and the advisers of the Crown in its executive functions are the same men, and under which the elected persons, presumed for the moment to represent the people, are allowed for that moment an almost unfettered supremacy.

Thus there was much that made it easy for the Colonies to combine in the single act of repudiating British sovereignty, yet the characteristics which may be ascribed to them in common were not such as inclined them or fitted them to build up a great new unity.

The Colonies, however, backed up by the British Government with the vigour which Chatham imparted to it, had acted together against a common danger from the French.  When the States, as we must now call them, acted together against the British Government they did so in name as “United States,” and they shortly proceeded to draw up “Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union.”  But it was union of a feeble kind.  The separate government of each State, in its internal affairs, was easy to provide for; representative institutions always existed, and no more change was needed than to substitute elected officers for the Governors and Councillors formerly appointed by the Crown.  For the Union a Congress was provided which was to represent all the States in dealings with the outside world, but it was a Government with no effective powers except such as each separate State might independently choose to lend it.  It might wage war with England, but it could not effectually control or regularly pay the military service of its own citizens; it might make a treaty of peace with England, but it could not enforce on its citizens distasteful obligations of that treaty.  Such an ill-devised machine would have worked well enough for a time, if the Union Government could have attached to itself popular sentiments of honour and loyalty.  But the sentiments were not there; and it worked badly.