to absent themselves; and a single member from Delaware or Rhode Island could, if present, balance the whole representation from New York or Virginia. "It is enough to sicken one," wrote General Knox to Washington, in March, 1783, "to observe how light a matter many States make of their not being represented in Congress-a good proof of the badness of the present Constitution." Even on the great occasion when the resignation of Washington was to be received, there were present only twenty members, representing but seven of the colonies. "It is difficult," wrote M. Otto to the French government, "to assemble seven States, which form the number required to transact the least important business;" and he wrote again, a few months after, that the secret of the predominant influence of Massachusetts in the Congress was that she usually kept four or five able delegates there, while other States rarely had two. As we read the records we can only wonder that the organization did its work so well; and it is not at all strange that, as the same General Knox wrote to Washington, the favorite toasts in the army were, "Cement to the Union" and "A hoop to the barrel."

There were those who believed that nothing but the actual necessities of another war could really unite the colonies, and some patriots frankly wished for that calamity. M. Otto, writing home in December, 1785, to M. De Vergennes, declared that Mr. Jay was the most influential man in Congress, and that Mr. Jay had lately expressed in his hearing a wish that the Algerine pirates, then so formidable, would burn some of the maritime towns of the United States, in order to reunite the nation and call back the old feeling. The majority of Congress perceive very clearly," he wrote, "that war would serve as a bond to the Confederation, but they cannot conceal the lack of means which they possess to carry it on with advantage."

This desperate remedy being out of the question, the "hoop to the barrel" must be put on by some more peaceful method.

Yet each way had its own perplexities. There were jealousies of long standing between North and South, between the colonies which were ready to abolish slavery and those which clung to it. Then the course of the Confederation had only increased. the mutual distrust between the small and the large States. There were objections to a permanent president; some would have preferred, as a very few would still prefer, to have a system like that now prevailing in the Swiss Confederation, and to place at the head merely the chairman of a committee. Again, there existed a variety of opinions as to a Legislature of one or two Houses. It is said that when Jefferson returned from France he was breakfasting with Washington, and asked him why he agreed to a Senate.

"Why," said Washington, "did you just now pour that coffee into your saucer before drinking it?" To cool it," said Jefferson; "my throat is not made of brass." "Even so," said Washington, "we pour our legislation into the Senatorial saucer to cool it."

Franklin, like Jefferson, approved only of the single chamber of deputies, and it has been thought that to his great influence in France, leading to the adoption of that method, were due some of the excesses of the French Revolution. The States of Pennsylvania and Georgia had, during the Confederation, but one legislative body; the Confederation itself had but one, and the great State of New York voted in the convention of 1787 against having more than one. Some of the most enlightened European reformers-Mazzini, Louis Blanc, Stuart Mill, even Goldwin Smith - have always believed the second House to be a source of weakness in American institutions, while the general feeling of Americans is overwhelmingly in its favor. Yet its mere existence is a type of that combination which is at the foundation of the national government. If Patrick Henry was right, if he had wholly ceased to be a Virginian in becoming an American, then there should be

no separate representation of the States. If Jefferson was right -who considered the Union only a temporary device to carry the colonies through the war for Independence-then the States only should be represented, and they should weigh equally, whether small or large. But Elbridge Gerry included both

statements when he said: "We are neither the same nation nor different nations. We ought not, therefore, to pursue the one or the other of these ideas too closely." This statement is regarded by Von Holst, the acutest foreign critic of American institutions since De Tocqueville, as containing the whole secret of American history.

We are apt to suppose that the sentiment of union among the colonies, once formed, went steadily on increasing. Not at all; it went, like all other things, by action and reaction. It was before a shot was fired that Patrick Henry had thrilled the people's ears with his proud assertion of nationality. "The distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New-Yorkers, and New-Englanders are no more. I am not a Virginian; I am an American." But as the war went on, the "people" of the United States came again to be loosely described as the "inhabitants of the States. The separate commonwealths had the organization, the power, all but the army; and one of them, North Carolina, went so far as to plan a fleet. The Confederation was only, as it described itself, "a firm league of friendship;" the Continental government was once actually characterized in Massachusetts as a foreign power; it was the creation of war's necessities, while the States controlled the daily life. Washington had to complain that the States were too much engaged in their "local concerns," and he had to plead for the “ ness of a nation." Fisher Ames wrote, Fisher Ames wrote, “Instead of feeling as a nation, a State is our country." So far as the influence of foreign nations went, it tended only to disintegrate, not to unite. Even the one friendly government of Europe, the French, had no interest in promoting union; the cabinet at Versailles wrote to its minister in America (August 30, 1787) that it would not regret to see the Confederation broken up, and that it had recognized "no other object than to deprive Great Britain of that vast continent."

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In short, the Confederation waned day by day; it had no power, for power had been carefully withheld from it; it had only influence, and, as Washington once said, “Influence is not government." Fisher Ames declared that "the corporation of a college or a missionary society were greater potentates than Congress. . . . The government of a great nation had barely revenue enough to buy stationery for its clerks, or to pay the

salary of the door-keepers." It existed only to carry on the war as it best could, and when the war ended, the prestige of the Confederation was gone. There was left a people without a government, and this people was demoralized amid suc

cess, discontented in spite of its triumph. Washington thus despairingly summed up the situation: "From the high ground we stood upon, from the plain path which invited our footsteps, to be so fallen, so lost, is really mortifying; but virtue, I fear,