domestic dissensions and incipient
civil war and the general impressions manifested in the same nation two
centuries and a half later, on the outbreak of the slavery rebellion, as
to the constitution of the United States.

The States in arms against the general government on the other side of
the Atlantic were strangely but not disingenuously assumed to be
sovereign and independent, and many statesmen and a leading portion of
the public justified them in their attempt to shake off the central
government as if it were but a board of agency established by treaty and
terminable at pleasure of any one of among sovereigns and terminable at
pleasure of any one of them.

Yet even a superficial glance at the written constitution of the Republic
showed that its main object was to convert what had been a confederacy
into an Incorporation; and that the very essence of its renewed political
existence was an organic law laid down by a whole people in their
primitive capacity in place of a league banding together a group of
independent little corporations. The chief attributes of sovereignty--the
rights of war and peace, of coinage, of holding armies and navies, of
issuing bills of credit, of foreign relations, of regulating and taxing
foreign commerce--having been taken from the separate States by the
united people thereof and bestowed upon a government provided with a
single executive head, with a supreme tribunal, with a popular house of
representatives and a senate, and with power to deal directly with the
life and property of every individual in the land, it was strange indeed
that the feudal, and in America utterly unmeaning, word Sovereign should
have been thought an appropriate term for the different States which had
fused themselves three-quarters of a century before into a Union.

When it is remembered too that the only dissolvent of this Union was the
intention to perpetuate human slavery, the logic seemed somewhat perverse
by which the separate sovereignty of the States was deduced from the
constitution of 1787.

On the other hand, the Union of Utrecht of 1579 was a league of petty
sovereignties; a compact less binding and more fragile than the Articles
of Union made almost exactly two hundred years later in America, and the
worthlessness of which, after the strain of war was over, had been
demonstrated in the dreary years immediately following the peace of 1783.
One after another certain Netherland provinces had abju