ker was New York, and the country of the
Virginian was Virginia. The New England colonies had once confederated;
but, kindred as they were, they had long ago dropped apart. William Penn
proposed a plan of colonial union wholly fruitless. James II. tried to
unite all the northern colonies under one government; but the attempt
came to naught. Each stood aloof, jealously independent. At rare
intervals, under the pressure of an emergency, some of them would try to
act in concert; and, except in New England, the results had been most
discouraging. Nor was it this segregation only that unfitted them for
war. They were all subject to popular legislatures, through whom alone
money and men could be raised; and these elective bodies were sometimes
factious and selfish, and not always either far-sighted or reasonable.
Moreover, they were in a state of ceaseless friction with their
governors, who represented the king, or, what was worse, the feudal
proprietary. These disputes, though varying in intensity, were found
everywhere except in the two small colonies which chose their own
governors; and they were premonitions of the movement towards
independence which ended in the war of Revolution. The occasion of
difference mattered little. Active or latent, the quarrel was always
present. In New York it turned on a question of the governor's salary;
in Pennsylvania on the taxation of the proprietary estates; in Virginia
on a fee exacted for the issue of land patents. It was sure to arise
whenever some public crisis gave the representatives of the people an
opportunity of extorting concessions from the representative of the
Crown, or gave the representative of the Crown an opportunity to gain a
point for prerogative. That is to say, the time when action was most
needed was the time chosen for obstructing it.

In Canada there was no popular legislature to embarrass the central
power. The people, like an army, obeyed the word of command,--a military
advantage beyond all price.

Divided in government; divided in origin, feelings, and principles;
jealous of each other, jealous of the Crown; the people at war with the
executive, and, by the fermentation of internal politics, blinded to an
outward danger that seemed remote and vague,--such were the conditions
under which the British colonies drifted into a war that was to decide
the fate of the continent.

This war was the strife of a united and concentred few against a divided
and discorda