have known. Some, stealing along a path remote from the excitements of the present, seemed to find the great joy of life in deepening the legends on the tombstones of the fathers. Some, loaded with the cares of preserving, for the present and the future, what the venerable generations gone bequeathed, and keeping the salt from losing its savor, seemed to turn from their dusty paths to these mossy wells of wholesome instruction, like the tired heart to the water-brooks. Happy both, in having learned to revere such a venerable and instructive antiquity! Happy both, in the inclination to imbibe and enforce such lessons! Happy the community, which, sympathizing with such minds, trains itself, by contemplation of the simple virtues of former weak and troubled days, to use prosperity without giddiness, and power without rashness or pride! The founders of New England left a rich inheritance to their children, but in nothing so precious as in the memory of their wise and steady virtue. May there never be baseness to affront that memory! May there never be indifference to lose or disregard it! May its ennobling appeal never fail of a quick response in the hearts of any generation of dwellers on this honored soil! THE NEW ENGLAND CONFEDERACY OF MDCXLIII. A DISCOURSE DELIVERED BEFORE THE SOCIETY, ON THE TWENTY-NINTH OF MAY, 1843; IN CELEBRATION OF THE SECOND CENTENNIAL ANNIVERSARY OF THAT EVENT. BY JOHN QUINCY ADAMS. MY BRETHREN OF THE MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY: IN reviewing the history of this confederated Union, one of the first remarks which impresses itself on the mind of the philosophical observer is the heterogeneous and conflicting primitive elements of which it was composed. It has been said that the most essential qualifications for a historian are to have neither religion nor country. And if religion consisted of a blind, unquestioning zeal in support of speculative dogmas transmitted from generation to generation, under the seal of a fisherman's ring, and the infallible dictate of a fallible man; if patriotism were compounded of the mere impulse of passion to support, right or wrong, the purposes of the land in which you were born, or the community to which you belong, then, indeed, the devout worshipper and the ardent patriot must discard all the emblems of his religion and his country, before he may dare to assume the pen of the historian. History is the record of the transactions of human beings associated in communities,—not of all their transactions, because there are multitudes of human actions which neither the actor nor any other of his fellow-creatures can have any possible interest in remembering; and other greater multitudes, which the interest of the actor and of all othesr requires to be buried in oblivion. But whatever in the transactions of associated man bears on the causes and motives of their congregation into communities, and on their corporate existence and well-being, assumes the character of a material for history. The history of the United States of America commenced with a bloody revolution and a seven years' war, which separated a part of them from the condition of colonies, subject to the sovereignty of the crown of England, from which they had received their charters. These charters as colonies gave them no right either to dissolve their allegiance to their common sovereign beyond the seas or to form any confederation or alliance between themselves, much less to constitute themselves one people. This complicated and transcendent act of sovereignty was, and could be, performed only by the people themselves, through their representatives. As representatives of the colonies, they could have no right to dissolve their allegiance; as representatives of the colonies, they could exercise only delegated power, and the colonies themselves had no power either to dissolve their own allegiance or to form a new social compact constituting a new sovereign authority over them all. By the dissolution of their ties and oaths of allegiance they dissolved also their connection with their country. They were no longer British subjects. They renounced all claim of protection from the government of Great Britain. They held, and declared they held, the people of Great Britain no longer as countrymen, fellowsubjects, or fellow-citizens; but as the rest of mankind, "enemies in war, in peace friends." Their union de facto had existed from the time of the first meeting of the Congress at Philadelphia, in September, 1774; but that union had been formed, not by chartered rights, but by the primitive, natural rights of man, revolutionary and transcendental, - the inalienable right of resistance to oppression, -the right bestowed by the God of nature, preceding all human association, to dissolve a government which fails to discharge the duties for which all governments are instituted, and the resulting right to form and establish a new government to supply the place of that which had been dissolved. This dissolution of allegiance was thus proclaimed by the whole people of these North American colonies, and, with the dissolution of the common allegiance, they declared the colonies free and independent states. They thereby reconferred upon the colonial governments all the authorities which by the charters of the several colonies they had possessed, and, without forming one general government for the whole people, left to the people of each several State the right of forming for themselves a State constitution, and proceeded to form for the whole a confederation of separate and independent States. a The revolutionary union still continued. The people of the several States formed and established their separate State constitutions. Four years of time were consumed in the painful and laborious preparation, by the joint agency of the General Congress and of the State legislatures, of a confederation, which, when adopted, proved to be a body without a soul, - a marble statue, without Promethean fire. The whole people of the Union were taught by severe experience that what they wanted was a common government, and that a confederacy is not a government. They commenced their work again as one people, and formed the constitution of the United States, government under which more than one generation of men have already lived and passed away; and which, with the blessing of Divine Providence, we may yet hope will prove a bond of union to this great and growing nation, for untold ages yet to come. At this time, its most imminent dangers arise not from external aggression, but from its prospects and temptations to aggrandizement. The territories which originally constituted the domain of the North American Union, already so extensive, at the time when the constitution was under the consideration of the people, as to constitute one of the most formidable objections against its adoption, have since that period been more than doubled by the acquisition and annexation of Louisiana and the Floridas. With the expansion of the surface of soil, to be cultivated and replenished by the swarming myriads of our future population, men of other races, the children of other blood, bred to other opinions, accustomed to other institutions, trained to other preju dices, and disciplined to other principles, have been invested with the community of our rights, and mingled with the tide of our common concerns. It was by the accession of foreign conquered nations to the rights and privileges of Roman citizens, that the republic degenerated into an empire, and the empire itself was overrun and extinguished by hordes of foreign barbarians. The people of the United States themselves, who declared and achieved their independence, were not all of one common origin. The United Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, the refugees from religious persecution in France, had contributed to the still scanty streams of population covering the broad surface of the thirteen colonies at the time of < their political revolution. In the In the origin of the colonies. which united to achieve their independence, the most opposite and discordant elements were combined. All the < parties, religious and political, which for more than two centuries had convulsed and desolated the mother country, were now united in harmony against her. The cavalier of the court of James the First had begun the settlement of Virginia, though the name of the colony dated back to the romantic age of Elizabeth. The rigid Roman Catholic nobleman of Ireland formed the adjoining settlement to that of Virginia; while, at a later period, the aristocratic republic of John Locke at the south, and the hereditary Quaker monarchy of William Penn at the north, bordered upon the settlements of Virginia and Maryland. Next to these, Sweden, in the days of Christina, and the United Netherlands, emancipated from the dominion of Spain, had commenced establishments destined to fall at an early day, by the right of conquest, into the hands of the Anglo-Saxon. The spirit of adventure in France had already penetrated to those mediterranean seas which seem to be but the overflowing of the river St. Lawrence, and to the hyperborean skies of Acadia. The first English colony upon this continent had received from the Virgin Queen, even before its birth, the name, now so illustrious, of Virginia. By her immediate successor, James the First, there was granted a territory, from the thirtieth to the forty-eighth degree of latitude, to two companies of merchants, one residing in London and |