The Constitution of the United States | Page 8

London company was
Shakespeare's patron, the Earl of Southampton, and it is not a fanciful
conjecture to assume that, when the news of the disaster which befell
one of the fleets of the London Company on the Island of Bermuda
reached England, it inspired Shakespeare to write his incomparable sea
idyl, The Tempest. If so, this lovely drama was Shakespeare's
unconscious apostrophe to America, for in Ariel--seeking to be
free--can be symbolized her awakening spirit, while Prospero, with his
thaumaturgic achievements, suggests a constructive genius, which in a
little more than a century has made one of the least of the nations
to-day one of the greatest.
Bacon, Sandys, Southampton and the Liberal leaders of the House of
Commons had implanted in the ideas of the colonists the spirit of
constitutionalism, which was destined to influence profoundly the
whole development of the American colonies, and finally to culminate
in the Constitution of the United States.
The later struggle in the Long Parliament, the fall of Charles I, and
more especially the deposition of James II, the accession of William of
Orange, and the substitution for the Stuart claim of divine right that of
the supremacy of the people in Parliament, naturally had their reaction
in the Western World in intensifying the spirit of constitutionalism in
the growing American Commonwealth.
The colonial history was therefore increasingly marked by a spirit of
individualism, a natural partiality for local rule, and a tenacious
adherence to their special privileges, whether granted to Crown
colonies, like New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, the
two Carolinas, and Georgia, or proprietary governments, like Maryland,
Delaware, and Pennsylvania, or charter governments, such as
Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. In the three colonies
last named formal corporate charters were granted by the Crown, which
in themselves were constitutions in embryo, and the colonists thus
acquired written rights as to the government of their internal affairs,

upon the maintenance of which they jealously insisted. Thus arose the
spirit in America, which treated constitutional rights, not so much as
special privileges granted by plenary Sovereignty, but as contractual
obligations which could be enforced in the Courts against the
Sovereign.
All this developed in the colonists a powerful sense of constitutional
morality, and its pertinency to my present theme lies in the fact that
when each of the thirteen colonies became, at the conclusion of the War
of Independence, a separate and independent nation, they were more
concerned, in establishing a central government, to limit its authority
and to maintain local self-government than they were to give to the
new-born nation the powers which it needed. They carried their
constitutionalism to extremes, which nearly made a strong and efficient
central government an impossibility.
Nothing was less desired by them than a unified government. It was
destined to be wrung from their hard necessities. The Constitution was
the reflex action of two opposing tendencies, the one the imperative
need of an efficient central government, and the other the passionate
attachment to local self-rule. Co-operation between the colonies had
been a matter of long discussion and earnest debate, and primarily
resulted from the necessity of defence against a common foe the French
in Canada, and the Indians of the forest. In 1643 four of the New
England colonies united in a league to defend themselves. In 1693
William Penn made the first suggestion for a union of all the colonies.
In 1734 a council was held at Albany at the instance of the Crown to
provide the means for the defence against France in Canada, and it was
then that Franklin submitted the first concrete form for a union of the
colonies into a permanent alliance. It was in advance of the times, for,
conservative as it was, it was unfortunately opposed both by the Crown
and the colonies themselves.
The time was not ripe for any such union, and the reason was apparent.
The colonies differed very much in the character of their populations,
in the nature of their economic interests, and in their political
antecedents. They were not wholly of the English race. Many nations in

Europe had already contributed to the population. For example, New
York was partly Dutch, and in Pennsylvania there was a considerable
element of the Swedes, Germans, and Swiss. Moreover, the colonists
were as widely separated from each other, measured by the facilities of
locomotion, as are the most remote nations of the world to-day. Only a
few men ever found occasion to leave their colony to journey to
another, and most men never left, from birth to death, the community in
which they lived. Outside of the few scattered communities in the
different colonies there was an almost unbroken wilderness, with few
wagon roads and in places only a bridle path. The only methods of
communication were