Nine colonies were represented. This was called the Stamp Act Congress. The act passed by the British Parliament to force the tea of the East India Company on the colonies, assembled the second Congress. There were other "grievances," such as taxing the imports of one colony carried into another.

The Colonists rebelled, and fought inside the British Union. Then came the atrocities of a German contingent of the British army, by which the people of the United Colonies suffered. These acts caused the Declaration of Independence to pass without submitting the measure to the people. It had no constituency. Congress could repeal it at any moment during their session. Thus to the inhumanity of the Waldeckers and Hessians is to be ascribed the transfer of hostilities of the United Colonists to the outside of the British Crown.

Before it was called rebellion; thenceforth it was called a war for independence. In 1778 Great Britain sent, in advance of the treaty of alliance with France, acts of Parliament granting in full a "redress of grievances." Washington and Congress suppressed them. The war had gone too far. Ambition on one hand and justice on the other declared dually for complete independence. Dr. Franklin was the author of the "Perpetual

Union" Articles of Confederation. They went down before the sovereign idea of consent. Dean Swift had given Jefferson and Franklin a great hint. It was this: "Government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of tyranny." Jefferson engrafted this caustic truth upon the Declaration. Franklin, as a member of the "Federal Convention," retreated from "Perpetual Union." Out of the mere commercial convention at Annapolis originated a political movement from which, with the general plan of the Articles of Confederation, sprung the Constitution of 1787. Only Rhode Island and North Carolina clung to the first Constitution, refusing to enter the new Union.

So, then, Tariff or Tax was the father of Colonial Rebellion, Independence the grandchild, and Constitutional Government the great-grandchild. Truly a strange political evolution!

Are there new developing historic chapters?

Yes. It is charged that the French Premier, the Count Vergennes, stimulated the Colonists. through the agency of spies and gold. The Baron De Kalb was said to have been one of his reliable agents.

It is charged that ratification of the Constitution was secured in some cases by the undue

influence of the owners of the forty millions public debt of the Confederation, to secure its validity and payment as set forth in Article VI. of the new Constitution. Ambitious motives were ascribed to men whom we are accustomed to regard as unselfish patriots. On the whole, we are led to imagine that history and biography have been cooked with the art of literary Francatellis, and that our ancestors were neither better nor worse than their descendants of this year of grace.

Human nature in the old colonial days, in our young stateshood, and in our nearly full-grown confederation has not essentially altered, nor will it, whether man was evolved from a protoplasm, an ape, or Adam. It still, as in primordial societies, seeks office, loves power, and courts ease and adulation. Our forefathers were simply men, and neither gods nor demigods, nor are their descendants the sons of gods or of demigods. Our late war made cheap great men, and that fact is causing a deeper investigation into preceding history. The mythic hero is passing away with the roseate eulogist, for the hand of Truth is writing history and biography.

Is the Constitution complete?

We have seen that it is amendable, and marked some omissions elsewhere, but such is the consoli

dating tendencies of the latter-day "strong government" men or nationalists that it were best to let it alone. To this rule there may be two exceptions, viz. the completion of Section 4 of Article I., so as to prohibit Congressional interference with elections, as hitherto mentioned; and the creation of a common judge in case of internal danger of revolution and separation, also hitherto mentioned. The original authors should have settled the internal improvement and tariff questions. Generalities take the place of specialties. Epigrammatic enumerations give elastical interpretation. Thus the foregoing great questions are relegated to brief clauses relating to the regulation of commerce and the laying of duties on imports. The President should have been allowed to veto any item or items of an appropriation bill. New States without the requisite population have been admitted under the platitudinous words: "New States may be admitted into this Union." "Congress shall have power to establish post-offices and post-roads," are words so vague that Congress and Postmaster-Generals have but little regard for the sacred privacy of correspondence which is an element of free speech, nor of that liberty of the press which is the palladium of a sovereign people.

There is no limitation to departmental creations

under the "general welfare" phrase, and hence we have a Secretary of Agriculture, and a Bureau of Education, which will perhaps in time evolve a Secretary of Education. Without constitutional warrant the agents of the States are made pedagogic, piscatory, entomologic, and herbivorous! Commissioners of bureaux are increasing all for the "general welfare."

So much time was spent by the convention of 1787 in the bitter contest beween the large and small States, that the fatigued members were eager to adjourn and go home. This, together with other conflicting opinions, accounts for the omissions and generalities.

Many deputies had quietly left the convention, discontented with some of its legislation. The signers, headed by General Washington, dined together, and congratulated each other on the work accomplished in little less than five months. The time was too short to lay the foundations so broad and deep as to maintain a superstructure which should defy the centuries of change. The structure is a mixture of Doric, Corinthian, Ionic, and Composite. It ought to have been Doric.

CONCLUDING WORDS.

Such is the Constitution of the United States of America. It is not jure divino-only the best