reby new
strength and vigor to the faculties of both; possessing also this
additional advantage, that while the several States enjoy all the rights
reserved to them of separate and independent governments, and each is
secured by the nature of the Federal Government, which acts directly on
the people, against the failure of the others to bear their equal share
of the public burdens, and thereby enjoys in a more perfect degree all
the advantages of a league, it holds them together by a bond altogether
different and much stronger than the late Confederation or any league
that was ever known before--a bond beyond their control, and which can
not even be amended except in the mode prescribed by it. So great an
effort in favor of human happiness was never made before; but it became
those who made it. Established in the new hemisphere, descended from the
same ancestors, speaking the same language, having the same religion and
universal toleration, born equal and educated in the same principles of
free government, made independent by a common struggle and menaced by
the same dangers, ties existed between them which never applied before
to separate communities. They had every motive to bind them together
which could operate on the interests and affections of a generous,
enlightened, and virtuous people, and it affords inexpressible
consolation to find that these motives had their merited influence.

In thus tracing our institutions to their origin and pursuing them
in their progress and modifications down to the adoption of this
Constitution two important facts have been disclosed, on which it may
not be improper in this stage to make a few observations. The first is
that in wresting the power, or what is called the sovereignty, from
the Crown it passed directly to the people. The second, that it passed
directly to the people of each colony and not to the people of all the
colonies in the aggregate; to thirteen distinct communities and not
to one. To these two facts, each contributing its equal proportion,
I am inclined to think that we are in an eminent degree indebted for
the success of our Revolution. By passing to the people it vested in
a community every individual of which had equal rights and a common
interest. There was no family dethroned among us, no banished pretender
in a foreign country looking back to his connections and adherents here
in the hope of a recall; no order of nobility whose hereditary rights in
the Gov