d personal intercourse for the
interchange of ideas. There was time, however, for careful reading of
the few available books; there was time for thought, for writing, for
discussion, and for social intercourse. It hardly seems too much to say,
therefore, that there was seldom, if ever, a people-certainly never
a people scattered over so wide a territory-who knew so much about
government as did this controlling element of the people of the United
States.

The practical character, as well as the political genius, of the
Americans was never shown to better advantage than at the outbreak of
the Revolution, when the quarrel with the mother country was manifesting
itself in the conflict between the Governors, and other appointed
agents of the Crown, and the popularly elected houses of the colonial
legislatures. When the Crown resorted to dissolving the legislatures,
the revolting colonists kept up and observed the forms of government.
When the legislature was prevented from meeting, the members would come
together and call themselves a congress or a convention, and, instead of
adopting laws or orders, would issue what were really nothing more
than recommendations, but which they expected would be obeyed by their
supporters. To enforce these recommendations extra-legal committees,
generally backed by public opinion and sometimes concretely supported by
an organized "mob," would meet in towns and counties and would be often
effectively centralized where the opponents of the British policy were
in control.

In several of the colonies the want of orderly government became so
serious that, in 1775, the Continental Congress advised them to form
temporary governments until the trouble with Great Britain had been
settled. When independence was declared Congress recommended to all the
States that they should adopt governments of their own. In accordance
with that recommendation, in the course of a very few years each
State established an independent government and adopted a written
constitution. It was a time when men believed in the social contract
or the "compact theory of the state," that states originated through
agreement, as the case might be, between king and nobles, between king
and people, or among the people themselves. In support of this doctrine
no less an authority than the Bible was often quoted, such a passage for
example as II Samuel v, 3: "So all the elders of Israel came to the King
to Hebron; and King David made a