clamoured for more money to permit the easy payment of
obligations, and succeeded in compelling more than half of the States
to pass laws hindering the collection of debts and emitting bills of
credit, which promptly depreciated. Worse remained. In New Hampshire,
armed bands tried to intimidate the legislature; and in Massachusetts
the rejection of such laws brought on actual insurrection. Farmers
assembled under arms, courts were broken up, and a sharp little civil
war, known as Shays' Rebellion, was necessary before the State
government could re-establish order.

In these circumstances, a sudden strong reaction against mob rule and
untrammelled democracy ran through the country, swinging all men of
property and law-abiding habits powerfully in favour of the demand
{138} for a new, genuinely authoritative, national government, able to
compel peace and good order. So the leaders of the reform party
struck; and at a meeting of Annapolis in October, 1786, summoned
originally to discuss the problem of navigating the Potomac River, they
issued a call for a convention of delegates from all the States to meet
at Philadelphia in May, 1787, for the purpose of recommending
provisions "intended to render the federal government adequate to the
exigencies of the Union." This movement, reversing the current of
American history, gained impetus in the winter of 1787. Congress
seconded the call; and, after Virginia had shown the way by nominating
its foremost men as delegates, the other States fell into line and sent
representatives--all but Rhode Island, which was the scene of an orgy
of paper-money tyranny, and would take no part in any such meeting.

Of the fifty-five men present at the Philadelphia convention, not more
than half-a-dozen were of the old colonial type, which clung to
individual State independence as the palladium of liberty. All the
others felt that the time had come to lay the most thoroughgoing
limitations upon the States, with the express purpose of preventing any
future repetition of the existing inter-State wrangles, and especially
of the financial {139} abuses of the time; and they were ready to gain
this end by entrusting large powers to the central government. They
divided sharply, however, on one important point, namely, whether the
increased powers were to be exercised by a government similar to the
existing one, or by something wholly new and far more centralized; and
over this question the conve