, over which, bounding herself by the
Mississippi, she was thenceforth to hold divided empire only with
Spain. She had acquired undisputed control over the Indian tribes
still tenanting the forests unexplored by the European man. She had
established an uncontested monopoly of the commerce of all her
colonies. But forgetting all the warnings of preceding ages--
forgetting the lessons written in the blood of her own children,
through centuries of departed time, she undertook to tax the people
of the colonies without their consent.

Resistance, instantaneous, unconcerted, sympathetic, inflexible
resistance, like an electric shock, startled and roused the people
of all the English colonies on this continent.

This was the first signal of the North American Union, The struggle
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 offenses 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 ass