vements, suggests a constructive genius, which in a little more
than a century has made one of the least of the nations to-day one of
the greatest.

Bacon, Sandys, Southampton and the Liberal leaders of the House of
Commons had implanted in the ideas of the colonists the spirit of
constitutionalism, which was destined to influence profoundly the whole
development of the American colonies, and finally to culminate in the
Constitution of the United States.

The later struggle in the Long Parliament, the fall of Charles I, and
more especially the deposition of James II, the accession of William of
Orange, and the substitution for the Stuart claim of divine right that
of the supremacy of the people in Parliament, naturally had their
reaction in the Western World in intensifying the spirit of
constitutionalism in the growing American Commonwealth.

The colonial history was therefore increasingly marked by a spirit of
individualism, a natural partiality for local rule, and a tenacious
adherence to their special privileges, whether granted to Crown
colonies, like New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, the two
Carolinas, and Georgia, or proprietary governments, like Maryland,
Delaware, and Pennsylvania, or charter governments, such as
Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. In the three colonies last
named formal corporate charters were granted by the Crown, which in
themselves were constitutions in embryo, and the colonists thus acquired
written rights as to the government of their internal affairs, upon the
maintenance of which they jealously insisted. Thus arose the spirit in
America, which treated constitutional rights, not so much as special
privileges granted by plenary Sovereignty, but as contractual
obligations which could be enforced in the Courts against the Sovereign.

All this developed in the colonists a powerful sense of constitutional
morality, and its pertinency to my present theme lies in the fact that
when each of the thirteen colonies became, at the conclusion of the War
of Independence, a separate and independent nation, they were more
concerned, in establishing a central government, to limit its authority
and to maintain local self-government than they were to give to the
new-born nation the powers which it needed. They carried their
constitutionalism to extremes, which nearly made a strong and efficient
central government an impossibility.

Nothing was less desired by them than a unified