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THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A STUDY

IN INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION

I. RISE OF THE IDEA OF UNION

A prima descendit origine mundi

Causarum series. (Lucan, Pharsalia, Book VI.)

The appreciation of a great and vital want will account for the origin of the idea of a common union. A study of its embodiment reveals the feature of growth. It is so original and peculiar, that it may be termed American. (Richard Frothingham, The Rise of The Republic of the United States, 1872, p. 28.)

Often, too, an institution may appear to be the result of direct imitation, when in fact it may be the product of a common race instinct, as in the case of the representative system reproducing itself in all the branches of the Teutonic race. . . . The law of historical continuity, or political inheritance, is not inconsistent with the law of historical variation, or political originality. In fact, the greater the accumulations of past experiences, the greater will be the capacity to solve by original methods the problems presented by new experiences. (William C. Morey, The First State Constitutions, 1893, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. IV, part I, p. 203.)

Mr. Gladstone recently pronounced it the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.

John Stuart Mill said, in his essay on De Tocqueville's "Democracy in America," that the whole edifice was constructed, within the memory of man, upon abstract principles." If we are to understand these expressions as meaning that the Constitution sprang into being, like Athené from the brain of Zeus, or that it was the work of doctrinaires endeavoring to found an ideal republic, it would be easy to show their falsity. The Constitution "has its roots deep in the soil of the past." No one generation, whatever its experience, could have invented such a system. It is a development, under a new environment, of old forms of government. Everything in it that was new was a "conservative innovation." (W. T. Brantly, Of the Influence of European Speculation in the Formation of the Federal Constitution, 1880, in Southern Law Review, New Series, Vol. VI, p. 351.)

Yet it is a characteristic of the race both in England and America that it has never really broken with the past. Whatever of novelty may appear from time to time, there is ever under all the great and steady force of historic continuity. (C. Ellis Stevens, Sources of the Constitution of the United States, 1894, 2nd edition, p. xvii.)

In fact, the distribution of political powers between co-ordinate governments - a system which sprang up in Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut and Rhode Island — had no existing counterpart in the countries of the civilized world. It can be historically explained only as the instinctive reproduction of primitive institutions under the influence of a primitive environment. (William C. Morey, The Sources of American Federalism, 1895, The American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. VI, p. 211.)

The new political system was a modification neither of the Confederation of 1781, nor of the Albany Union of 1754, nor of the New England Confederacy of 1643. These superficial alliances served, it is true, to bring the colonies and States into more amicable relations, by which they could aid each other against their common foes. But none of them contained the essential and distinctive features of that composite state-system which was established by the Constitution of 1787. We must search deeper into American political life, and

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perhaps into the common political life of our Teutonic, and even our Aryan ancestors to find the true historical sources of American federalism. (William C. Morey, The Sources of American Federalism, 1895, The American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol, V'I, p. 204.)

In the old system assemblies were not formally instituted, but grew up of themselves because it was the nature of Englishmen to assemble. (Sir John Robert Seeley, The Expansion of England, 1883, American edition, p. 67.)

A proposition for a Union was suggested at a meeting of Connecticut magistrates and ministers in Boston, in 1637. (Richard Frothingham, The Rise of The Republic of the United States, 1872, p. 39.)

The New-England Confederacy recognized the equality of the colonies that were parties to it, and the inviolability of their local governments; but the provisions designed to promote the common welfare were a crude embodiment of the union element. (Richard Frothingham, The Rise of The Republic of the United States, 1872, p. 72.)

But it is beginning to be realized that the Constitution of the United States, though possessing elements of novelty, is not, after all, the new creation that this idea would imply. It is not, properly speaking, the original composition of one body of men, nor the outcome of one definite epoch,- it is more and better than that. It does not stand in historical isolation, free of antecedents. It rests upon very old principles,-principles laboriously worked out by long ages of constitutional struggle. It looks back to the annals of the colonies and of the mother-land for its sources and its explanation. And it was rendered possible, and made what it is, by the political development of many generations of men. (C. Ellis Stevens, Sources of the Constitution of the United States, 1894, 2nd edition, pp. viii-ix.)

The best reason for American pride in the Constitution lies, not in the creative genius of its framers, nor in the beauty and symmetry of their work, but in the fact that it was and is a perfect expression of the institutional methods of its people. It is for that reason that it meets their needs as well to-day as in 1787-89. So long as they shall continue in the ways of their fathers; so long as they shall regard with pronounced disfavor the political quacks who constantly beg them to hazard a trial of never-tested remedies; so long may they continue to take a just pride in their Constitution, under all its possible coming changes, as one which has been adequately discussed," and the results of the discussion of which have been fully "tested by experiment." (Alexander Johnston, The First Century of the Constitution, The New Princeton Review, Vol. IV, No. 2, 1887, p. 190.)

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CHAPTER I

RISE OF THE IDEA OF UNION

On the 11th day of November, according to the old, but on the 21st day of November, 1620, according to the new order of things, some forty-one passengers of the Mayflower, whom a grateful posterity calls the Pilgrims, bringing to the New World a new type of men and a new spirit which we may with just pride call the American spirit, entered into a compact for their government when they should leave the little vessel which had carried them across a stormy ocean out of their course to the Hudson, for which region they had a patent, to the inhospitable shores of New England, for which they had no patent. The passage across the Atlantic had been stormy in more ways than one, for, in the absence of a patent from the New England Company, the Pilgrims were without title to the soil upon which they were soon to set foot. In the absence of a charter from the Crown, they were without authority to govern themselves as a body politic. Because of these things and also because of the frailties to which even some of their number were subject, the better part of them, believing that government as instituted among men derives its just powers from the consent of the governed and that this consent was in itself a compact on their part, entered into that agreement which we today call the Mayflower Compact, which they thus happily expressed:

Compact

In yo name of God, Amen. We whose names are underwriten, the loyall The Mayflower subjects of our dread soveraigne Lord, King James, by ye grace of God, of Great Britaine, Franc, & Ireland king, defender of ye faith, &c., haveing undertaken, for ye glorie of God, and advancemente of ye Christian faith, and honour of our king & countrie, a voyage to plant ye first colonie in ye Northerne parts of Virginia, doe by these presents solemnly & mutualy in y presence of God, and one of another, covenant & combine our selves togeather into a civill body politick, for our better ordering & preservation & furtherance of ye ends aforesaid; and by vertue hearof to enacte, constitute, and frame such just & equall lawes, ordinances, acts, constitutions, & offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meete & convenient for ye generall good of y Colonie, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.1

Just as the separatists, whom we call the Pilgrim fathers, traversed a waste of waters from the Old World to the New, so separatists in the political sense

1 William Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation, Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1856, 4th Series, Vol. iii, pp. 89–90.

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