service from absolute necessity, and those who remained were sinking into poverty; while the men grew impatient under their privations and want of pay.

And yet the British made no progress in recovering their colonies. Incalculable energy lay in reserve in the states and in their citizens individually. Though congress possessed no effective means of strengthening the regular army, there could always be an appeal to the militia, who were the people in arms. The strength of patriotism, however it might seem to slumber, was ready to break forth in every crisis of danger. The people never lost buoyant self-reliance, nor the readiness to make sacrifices for the public good.

Congress brought forward no proposition to clothe the union with powers of coercion, and by choice devolved the chief executive power upon their constituents. To the separate states it was left to enforce the embargo on the export of provisions; to sanction the seizure of grain and flour for the army at established prices; to furnish, and in great part to support, their quotas of troops; and to collect the general revenue, so far as its collection was not voluntary. Each state government was dearer to its inhabitants than the general government; the one was excellent, the other inchoate and incompetent. The former was sanctified by the memories and attachments of generations; the latter had no associations with the past, no traditions, no inherited affection. The states had power which they exercised to raise taxes, to pledge and keep faith, to establish order, to administer justice through able and upright and learned courts, to protect liberty and property and all that is dear in social life; the chief acts of congress were only propositions and promises. The states were everywhere represented by civil officers in their employ; congress had no magistrates, no courts, no executive agents of its own. The tendency of the general government was toward utter helplessness; so that, not from intention, but from the natural course of political development, the spirit and the habit of separatism grew with every year. In July 1776, the United States declared themselves to have called a "people" into being; at the end of 1778, congress knew no "people of the United States" but only "inhabitants." The name of "the

United States" began to give place to that of "the Confederated States," even before the phrase could pretend to historic validity. The attempt to form regiments directly by the United States completely failed; and each state maintained its separate line. There were thirteen distinct sovereignties and thirteen armies, with scarcely a symbol of national unity except in the highest offices.

From the height of his position, Washington was the first keenly to feel and clearly to declare that efficient power must be infused into the general government. To Benjamin Harrison, the president of the house of burgesses of Virginia, he wrote from the camp in December 1778: "The states separately are too much engaged in their local concerns, and have too many of their ablest men withdrawn from the general council for the good of the common weal. Our political system may be compared to the mechanism of a clock, and we should derive a lesson from it; for it answers no good purpose to keep the smaller wheels in order if the greater one, which is the support and prime mover of the whole, is neglected. If the great whole is mismanaged, the states individually must sink in the general wreck; in effecting so great a revolution, the greatest abilities and the most honest men our American world affords ought to be employed." He saw "America on the brink of" destruction; her "common interests, if a remedy were not soon to be applied, mouldering and sinking into irretrievable ruin." "Where," he asked, "are Mason, Wythe, Jefferson, Nicholas, Pendleton, Nelson, and another I could name?" He pleaded for "the momentous concerns of an empire," for "the great business of a nation." "The states, separately," such were his words, "are too much engaged in their local concerns;" and he never ceased his efforts, by conversation and correspondence, to train the statesmen of America, especially of his beloved native commonwealth, to the work of constructing the real union of the states.

CHAPTER XX.

THE KING OF SPAIN BAFFLED BY THE BACKWOODSMEN OF

VIRGINIA.

1778-1779.

THE Catholic king, whose public debt a large annual deficit was rapidly increasing, recoiled from war, and, above all, war which was leading to the irretrievable ruin of the old colonial system.

from

The management of its foreign dependencies-colonies they could not properly be named, nor could Spain be called their mother country-was to that kingdom an object of neversleeping suspicion, heightened by a consciousness that the task of governing them was beyond its ability. The total number of their inhabitants greatly exceeded its own. By their very extent, embracing, at least in theory, all the Pacific coast of America, and all the land west of the Mississippi and all Louisiana, it could have no secure feeling of their subordination. The remoteness of the provinces on the Pacific still more weakened its supremacy, which was nowhere confirmed by a common language or affinities of race; by the joint possession of political rights, or inbred loyalty. The connection between rulers and ruled was one of force alone; and the force was feeble and precarious. Distrust marked the policy of the home government, even toward those of its officials who were natives of Spain; still more toward the Creoles, as the offspring of Spaniards in America were called. No attempt had been made to bind the mind of the old races, except through the Roman religion, which was introduced by the sword and maintained by methods of superstition. There was, perhaps, never a time when the war-cry of some one of the

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semi-barbarous nations who formed the bulk of the population was not somewhere heard. The restraints on commerce provoked murmurs and frauds.

Moreover, all the world was becoming impatient that so large a portion of the globe should be monopolized by a decrepit dynasty. The Dutch and the British and the French sought opportunities of illicit trade. The British cut down forest-trees, useful in the workshop and the dye-house, and carried them off as unappropriated products of nature.

To these dangers Charles III. had added another by making war to the death on the so called company of Jesus. Of the prelates of Spain, seven archbishops and twenty-eight bishops, two thirds of them all approved the exile of the order from his dominions, and recommended its total dissolution; while only one bishop desired to preserve it without reform. With their concurrence, and the support of France and Portugal, he extorted the assent of the pope to the abolition of the order. On the second of April 1767, at one and the same hour in Spain, in the north and south of Africa, in Asia, in America, in all the islands of the monarchy, the royal decree was opened by officials of the crown, enjoining them immediately to take possession of its houses, to chase its members from their convents, and within twenty-four hours to transport them as prisoners to some appointed harbor. In Spain the Jesuit priests, without regard to their birth, education, or age, were sent on board ships to land where they could. The commands were executed less perfectly in Mexico and California, and still less so along the South Pacific coast and the waters of the La Plata.

But the power of Spain in America had rested in a great measure on the unwearied activity of the Jesuits as missionaries and teachers and organizers of the native population. Their banishment weakened her authority over Spanish emigrants, and confused the minds of the rude progeny of the aborigines. In Paraguay, where Spanish supremacy had rested alone on Jesuits who had held in their hands all the attributes of Cæsar and pope, of state and church, the revolution made a fracture that never could be healed. The independence of the United States threatened a very real danger in

all the boundless vice-royalties of Spain. As they had been won by adventurous leaders, so a priest, an aboriginal chief, a descendant of an Inca, might waken any of them to defy the Spanish rule. Jesuits might find shelter among their neophytes, and reappear as the guides of rebellion. One of their order has written: "When Spain tore evangelical laborers away from the colonies, the breath of independence agitated the New World, and God permitted it to detach itself from the Old."*

The United States did not merely threaten to hold the left bank of the Mississippi; but, as epidemic disease leaps mysteriously over mountains and across oceans, spores of discontent might be unaccountably borne to the many-tongued peoples of South America. Alluring promises of weakening Britain could soothe Florida Blanca no more; and, from the time when the court of France resolved to treat with the Americans, his prophetic fears were never allayed.

Early in the year 1778 Juan de Miralez, a Spanish emissary, appeared in Philadelphia. Not accredited to congress, for Spain would not recognise that body, he looked upon the rising republic as a natural enemy to his country; and through the French minister, with whom he had as yet no authorized connection, he sought to raise up obstacles to its progress. He came as a spy and an intriguer; nevertheless, congress, with unsuspecting confidence, welcomed him as the representative of an intended ally.

Count Montmorin, the French ambassador at Madrid, had in his childhood been a playmate of the king of France, whose friendship he retained. As a man of honor, he desired to deal fairly with the United States, and he watched with impartiality the politics of the Spanish court. On learning from him the separate determination of France to support the United States, Florida Blanca quivered in every limb and could hardly utter a reply. Ever haunted by the spectres of contraband trade, and of territorial encroachments, he was appalled at the example of the Americans as insurgents, and the colossal great

* Charles III. et les Jésuites de ses états d'Europe et d'Amérique en 1767. Documents inédits, publiés par le p. Auguste Carayon de la compagnie de Jésus, lxxxvi. et lxxxvii.