or social custom, they came to America where there was room for all and no one to care what they thought or how they worshiped or whether they had much or little government.

Inevitably such eccentric people founded small and dispersed communities. The Pilgrims, asserting that it belongeth not to the magistrate "to compel religion, to plant churches by power, and to force submission to Ecclesiastical Government by laws and penalties," first went to Holland; but when they could not be sufficiently "separated" there, they lifted up "their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits." They also quieted their spirits by coming to the bleak New England coast and settling at Plymouth, a tiny little community that maintained its separate government for eighty years. They preferred not to unite with the Puritans who settled Massachusetts Bay, although the difference between the Puritans and the Separatists seems to the modern mind very slight. The Puritans themselves were no sooner established at Boston than they began to quarrel over the precise nature of that "due form of government both civil and ecclesiastical" which they came to America to establish; and some of them, being expelled, went off with Roger Williams to found another tiny commonwealth at Providence

(Rhode Island), while others followed Thomas Hooker into a new wilderness and founded the colony of Connecticut. Still another group of Puritans, coming from London to Boston, but not finding the due form of government precisely right in every detail, went on to New Haven and founded there a Bible commonwealth that suited them. In origin and in their ideas of religion and government, all of these people were very much alike. Had they chosen to live together under one state, that state, seventy years after the first settlement, would have had a population of less than eighty thousand. But in spite of the extreme hardships of the wilderness, in spite of the danger from the Indians, these eighty thousand eccentrics could not possibly subordinate themselves to a single government. They preferred to live separated, according to the "strong bent of their spirits," in five distinct and independent states, each one an ideal commonwealth.

During a century and a half of colonial history the jealousy of local liberties and the practice of local government became firmly established, and each colony as a matter of course managed its own affairs in complete, independence of every other colony. The. only bond of union between the colonies was the British government, and the people of

the various colonies had usually but little intercourse with one another. When John Adams went to Philadelphia in 1774 to attend the first Continental Congress, he had never before been outside of New England. He entered New York with the same interested curiosity with which an American now goes for the first time to London; and he noted in his Diary, as the European tourist might do, his impressions of the people, of their dress and manners, of how their political institutions differed from those of New England, and commented upon the several kinds of food which he had for breakfast at the country seat of Mr. John Morin Scott.

This provincial point of view was not radically changed by the Revolution; and when independence was declared each colony regarded itself as an independent and sovereign state. It is true that independence was declared by the Continental Congress, but it was an associated declaration of the thirteen states. No colony was bound by the act of Congress until it gave its adherence to that act; and, in fact, the colony of New York did not vote for independence until July 9th, seven days after the resolution was voted in Congress.

The resolution by which Congress voted in favor of independence included a recom

mendation to the effect that each state should proceed forthwith to form a new state government; and in fact each state, assuming full sovereign rights, established a government to suit itself. The Revolution thus created thirteen independent states, each with its own constitution and its own government; and this system of state governments became and has remained to this day the foundation of the United States and of its political system. The original state governments were modeled upon the old colonial governments (the colonies of Connecticut and Rhode Island indeed retained for many years their old colonial charters as constitutions), and the structure of these governments, in its essential features, was much the same in all the states. There were the county or town officials for purely local affairs; there were the elected assemblies, in most cases of two houses, for the making of state laws; and there were the governors, elected directly by the people (except in New York), to whom were intrusted the administrative and executive functions. There are now forty-eight states in the Union. Each one has a written constitution, in accordance with which its government is organized; and although in the course of time the trend toward a greater degree of democracy has brought about many modifications in detail,

the structural features of municipal, county, and state governments remain what they were at the close of the eighteenth century.

It was upon this foundation that the United States government was erected. While the sovereignty of the states was the accepted idea at the close of the Revolution, every one felt that the people of the Colonies were in some measure a common people with a common destiny, and that, as they had united for defending their rights and the winning of independence, so they must continue to act together in their dealings with the outside world. In other words, it was agreed that the thirteen independent states ought to unite in a federation. This union had been achieved during the war by means of the Continental Congress; but the Continental Congress was only a temporary body with no specifically determined powers an assembly of deputies acting only upon instruction from their own. governments, its authority limited to recommendations, and its influence such as the prestige of its members or the exigencies of war might give to it. To take the place of the Continental Congress, the states finally adopted, after much wrangling, the Articles of Confederation.

The Articles of Confederation created a federal government without any effective