nd solemnly pledging the public faith for
their payment, it was implicitly declared that the sovereignty here
accorded to Congress was substantially the same as that which it had
asserted and exercised ever since the severing of the connection with
England. The articles simply defined the relations of the states to the
Confederation as they had already shaped themselves. Indeed, the
articles, though not finally ratified till 1781, had been known to
Congress and to the people ever since 1776 as their expected
constitution, and political action had been shaped in general accordance
with the theory on which they had been drawn up. They show that
political action was at no time based on the view of the states as
absolutely sovereign, but they also show that the share of sovereignty
accorded to Congress was very inadequate even to the purposes of an
effective confederation. The position in which they left Congress was
hardly more than that of the deliberative head of a league. For the
most fundamental of all the attributes of sovereignty--the power of
taxation--was not given to Congress. It could neither raise taxes
through an excise nor through custom-house duties; it could only make
requisitions upon the thirteen members of the confederacy in proportion
to the assessed value of their real estate, and it was not provided with
any means of enforcing these requisitions. On this point the articles
contained nothing beyond the vague promise of the states to obey. The
power of levying taxes was thus retained entirely by the states. They
not only imposed direct taxes, as they do to-day, but they laid duties
on exports and imports, each according to its own narrow view of its
local interests. The only restriction upon this was that such
state-imposed duties must not interfere with the stipulations of any
foreign treaties such as Congress might make in pursuance of treaties
already proposed to the courts of France and Spain. Besides all this,
the states shared with Congress the powers of coining money, of emitting
bills of credit, and of making their promissory notes a legal tender for
debts.

Such was the constitution under which the United States had begun to
drift toward anarchy even before the close of the Revolutionary War, but
which could only be amended by the unanimous consent of all the thirteen
states. The historian cannot but regard this difficulty of amendment as
a fortunate circumstance; for in the troubles which prese