dence of the colonies, as
North would have done four years earlier, when France intervened.
Terms of peace with European Powers were made more favourable by the
final success of Rodney at Dominica and of Elliot at Gibraltar; but
the warlike repute of England fell lower than at any time since the
Revolution.

The Americans proceeded to give themselves a Constitution which should
hold them together more effectively than the Congress which carried
them through the war, and they held a Convention for the purpose at
Philadelphia during the summer of 1787. The difficulty was to find
terms of union between the three great states--Virginia, Pennsylvania,
Massachusetts--and the smaller ones, which included New York. The great
states would not allow equal power to the others; the small ones would
not allow themselves to be swamped by mere numbers. Therefore one
chamber was given to population, and the other, the Senate, to the
states on equal terms. Every citizen was made subject to the federal
government as well as to that of his own state. The powers of the
states were limited. The powers of the federal government were
actually enumerated, and thus the states and the union were a check on
each other. That principle of division was the most efficacious
restraint on democracy that has been devised; for the temper of the
Constitutional Convention was as conservative as the Declaration of
Independence was revolutionary.

The Federal Constitution did not deal with the question of religious
liberty. The rules for the election of the president and for that of
the vice-president proved a failure. Slavery was deplored, was
denounced, and was retained. The absence of a definition of State
Rights led to the most sanguinary civil war of modern times. Weighed
in the scales of Liberalism the instrument, as it stood, was a
monstrous fraud. And yet, by the development of the principle of
Federalism, it has produced a community more powerful, more
prosperous, more intelligent, and more free than any other which the
world has seen.

APPENDIX

APPENDIX I

THE following letter was sent out to the contributors to the Cambridge
History. It will interest many, as giving characteristic expression
to Acton's ideals as a historian.

The paragraphs are left as in the original.

[From the Editor of the Cambridge Modern History.]

1. Our purpose is to obtain the best history of modern times
that the published or unpublished so