e was
for chartered rights--for English liberties--for the cause of Algernon
Sidney and John Hampden--for trial by jury--the Habeas Corpus and Magna
Charta.

But the English lawyers had decided that Parliament was omnipotent--and
Parliament, in its omnipotence, instead of trial by jury and the
Habeas Corpus, enacted admiralty courts in England to try Americans for
offences charged against them as committed in America; instead of
the privileges of Magna Charta, nullified the charter itself of
Massachusetts Bay; shut up the port of Boston; sent armies and navies to
keep the peace and teach the colonies that John Hampden was a rebel and
Algernon Sidney a traitor.

English liberties had failed them. From the omnipotence of Parliament
the colonists appealed to the rights of man and the omnipotence of the
God of battles. Union! Union! was the instinctive and simultaneous
cry throughout the land. Their Congress, assembled at Philadelphia,
once--twice--had petitioned the king; had remonstrated to Parliament;
had addressed the people of Britain, for the rights of Englishmen--in
vain. Fleets and armies, the blood of Lexington, and the fires of
Charlestown and Falmouth, had been the answer to petition, remonstrance,
and address....

The dissolution of allegiance to the British crown, the severance of
the colonies from the British Empire, and their actual existence as
independent States, were definitively established in fact, by war and
peace. The independence of each separate State had never been declared
of right. It never existed in fact. Upon the principles of the
Declaration of Independence, the dissolution of the ties of allegiance,
the assumption of sovereign power, and the institution of civil
government, are all acts of transcendent authority, which the people
alone are competent to perform; and, accordingly, it is in the name and
by the authority of the people, that two of these acts--the dissolution
of allegiance, with the severance from the British Empire, and the
declaration of the United Colonies, as free and independent States--were
performed by that instrument.

But there still remained the last and crowning act, which the people
of the Union alone were competent to perform--the institution of civil
government, for that compound nation, the United States of America.

At this day it cannot but strike us as extraordinary, that it does not
appear to have occurred to any one member of that assembly, which had
lai