[Pamphlets. American history]

41
and groping your way in continual danger of an explosion which will bury you beneath a mountain mass of
ruin,-you come up at last to the open, blessed sky,
tread beneath you the safe and solid ground, feel in every limb the genial warmth of the sun, listen to the
cheerful notes of birds, and breathe an atmosphere
loaded with all the fragrance of June.
IV. But neither the remedy of political grievances,
nor the assertion of national independence, nor the establishment of republican government, was the fulfilment
of the destiny of the American revolution. A higher object, still less premeditated than a separation from the
mother country, but resulting from deeper causes and involving more important interests, remained to be accomunplished. Before the revolution, the colonies formed a
group of republics mutually independent, bound to each
other by no constitutional ties, often acting together by
the force of circumstances, but without any general principle of political cohesion. Numerous points of similarity existed, and a common allegiance to the crown and
subjection to parliament, gave a show of unity to the colonies as a whole; but when this bond of connection was
severed by the Declaration of Independence, the thirteen
colonies stood before the world, with a strong vocation
indeed to union, but, as far as constitutional obligations
were concerned, in the attitude of thirteen independent
States.
Here was the truly critical point in our history, the
point from which the path of progress, (like that which
lay before the young Hercules,) branched off in a two6