tates. And here as the representatives
of the one people they had stopped. They did not require the
confirmation of this act, for the power to make the declaration had
already been conferred upon them by the people, delegating the power,
indeed, separately in the separate colonies, not by colonial authority,
but by the spontaneous revolutionary movement of the people in them all.

From the day of that Declaration, the constituent power of the people
had never been called into action. A confederacy had been substituted
in the place of a government, and State sovereignty had usurped the
constituent sovereignty of the people.

The Convention assembled at Philadelphia had themselves no direct
authority from the people. Their authority was all derived from the
State Legislatures. But they had the Articles of Confederation before
them, and they saw and felt the wretched condition into which they had
brought the whole people, and that the Union itself was in the agonies
of death. They soon perceived that the indispensably needed powers
were such as no State government, no combination of them, was by the
principles of the Declaration of Independence competent to bestow. They
could emanate only from the people. A highly respectable portion of the
assembly, still clinging to the confederacy of States, proposed, as
a substitute for the Constitution, a mere revival of the Articles of
Confederation, with a grant of additional powers to the Congress.
Their plan was respectfully and thoroughly discussed, but the want of a
government and of the sanction of the people to the delegation of powers
happily prevailed. A constitution for the people, and the distribution
of legislative, executive, and judicial powers was prepared. It
announced itself as the work of the people themselves; and as this was
unquestionably a power assumed by the Convention, not delegated to
them by the people, they religiously confined it to a simple power
to propose, and carefully provided that it should be no more than a
proposal until sanctioned by the Confederation Congress, by the State
Legislatures, and by the people of the several States, in conventions
specially assembled, by authority of their Legislatures, for the single
purpose of examining and passing upon it.

And thus was consummated the work commenced by the Declaration of
Independence--a work in which the people of the North American Union,
acting under the deepest sense of responsibility to the