kept at home in the state legislatures many of
the ablest men who would otherwise have been sent to the Congress.
Thus in point of intellectual capacity the latter body was distinctly
inferior in 1783 to what it had been when first assembled nine years
earlier.

[Sidenote: Anarchical tendencies.]
The arrival of peace did not help the Congress, but made matters worse.
When the absolute necessity of presenting a united front to the common
enemy was removed, the weakness of the union was shown in many
ways that were alarming. The _sentiment_ of union was weak. In spite of
the community in language and institutions, which was so favourable to
union, the people of the several states had many local prejudices which
tended to destroy the union in its infancy. A man was quicker to
remember that he was a New Yorker or a Massachusetts man than that he
was an American and a citizen of the United States. Neighbouring states
levied custom-house duties against one another, or refused to admit into
their markets each other's produce, or had quarrels about boundaries
which went to the verge of war. Things grew worse every year until by
the autumn of 1786, when the Congress was quite bankrupt and most of the
states nearly so, when threats of secession were heard both in New
England and in the South, when there were riots in several states and
Massachusetts was engaged in suppressing armed rebellion, when people in
Europe were beginning to ask whether we were more likely to be seized
upon by France or reconquered piecemeal by Great Britain, it came to be
thought necessary to make some kind of a change.

[Sidenote: The Federal Convention (1787).]

Men were most unwillingly brought to this conclusion, because they were
used to their state assemblies and not afraid of them, but they were
afraid of increasing the powers of any government superior to the states,
lest they should thus create an unmanageable tyranny. They believed that
even anarchy, though a dreadful evil, is not so dreadful as despotism,
and for this view there is much to be said. After no end of trouble a
convention was at length got together at Philadelphia in May, 1787, and
after four months of work with closed doors, it was able to offer to the
country the new Federal Constitution. Both in its character and in
the work which It did, this Federal Convention, over which Washington
presided, and of which Franklin, Madison, and Hamilton were members,
was one of the most re