Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/268

236 The Confederation. [1777-8: was declared to be " a firm league of friendship," for the common de- fence, security, and welfare. Professing to be no more than a " league " of the States, the Confederation did little more than make provision touching general public affairs, not wholly unlike what, according to late American theory, should have obtained between Great Britain and her colonies. The rest may be told in a few words. 1. The small States, by dint of persistence in stress of overwhelming danger, prevailed over the large, in the demand that political existence and not relative importance should be the basis of all legislation; each State, large or small, was to have one vote, and but one, in one Chamber. That alone would have been enough to prevent the Union from being "perpetual." 2. But, with still greater fatuity, the new government was permitted to deal only with the States as corporate bodies ; it could not act upon individuals except incidentally. 3. And then, to make inefficiency complete, the Confederation was to have, over the States themselves, no coercive authority. As Great Britain had done in the colonial period, before the Stamp Act troubles, the Con- federation made only requisition, that is request, upon the States, for supplies; if the supplies were not furnished, the Confederation, unlike the mother of the colonies, was helpless beyond appealing to the patriotism of the defaulting member. The only way to avoid the need of coercive authority over the States, which would never have been given, was to do what the country was not yet ready for, to give to the federal government, what the Constitution of the United States afterwards gave, authority over individuals. No division of the departments of government was provided for in the articles, the whole government being vested in a Congress of dele- gates from the States ; though power was given to Congress to " appoint Courts for the trial of piracies and felonies committed on the high seas," and " to appoint one of their number to preside " over the body, " pro- vided that no person be allowed to serve in the office of president more than one year in any term of three years." Such a government could not stand when peace, with its centripetal tendencies, returned ; the war alone pressed the States together. Failure was written in the very lines of the Confederation; the scheme held out a few years, but its life was only a tossing about in an unmanageable sea of troubles. By the time of the meeting of the Convention to form the Constitution of the United States, in 1787, it was ready to give up the struggle and go down. But the States were jealous and justly suspicious of each other, and the experience of the Confederation was both needful and wholesome; without it the Constitution would have been impossible at the time; by it, though by means of distress, came at last peace and order in the new and better form of government. And whatever was deemed of permanent value in the Confederation prevailed, in some form, in the Constitution.