against oppression and fighting for the right to govern itself, took possession of his imagination, and before he left the table the men of Lexington and Concord had won for America a volunteer in Lafayette. In Paris, wits, philosophers, and coffee-house politicians were all to a man warm Americans, considering them as a brave people, struggling for natural rights, and endeavoring to rescue those rights from wanton violence; and that, having no representatives in parliament, they could owe no obedience to British laws. This argument they turned in all its different shapes, and fashioned into general theories. The field of Lexington, followed by the taking of Ticonderoga, fixed the attention of the government of France. From the busy correspondence between Vergennes and the French embassy at London, it appeared that the British ministry were under a delusion in persuading themselves the Americans would soon tire; that the system of an exclusively maritime war was illusory, since America could so well provide for her wants within herself. Franklin, who was perfectly acquainted with the resources of Great Britain, was known to be more zealous than ever; he enjoyed at Versailles the reputation of being endowed by Heaven with qualities that made him the most fit to create a free nation, and to become the most celebrated among men. Vergennes traced the relation of the American revolution to the history of the world. "The spirit of revolt," said he, "wherever it breaks out, is always a troublesome example. Moral maladies, as well as those of the physical system, can become contagious. We must be on our guard, that the independence which produces so terrible an explosion in North America may not communicate itself to points that intérest us. We long ago made up our own mind to the results which are now observed; we saw with regret that the crisis was drawing near; we have a presentiment that it may be followed by more extensive consequences. We do not disguise from ourselves the aberrations which enthusiasm can encourage, and which fanaticism can effectuate." 1775. July. The contingent danger of a sudden attack on the French 1775. possessions in the West Indies required precaution; and Louis XVI. thought it advisable at once to send an emissary to America, to watch the progress of the revolution. This could best be done from England; and the July 10. embassy at London, as early as the tenth of July, began the necessary preliminary inquiries. "England," such was the substance of its numerous reports to Vergennes, "is in a position from which she never can extricate herself. Either all rules are false, or the Americans will never again consent to become her subjects." So judged the statesmen of France, on hearing of the retreat from Concord and the seizure of Ticonderoga. CHAPTER XXXIV. THE SECOND CONTINENTAL CONGRESS. MAY, 1775. A FEW hours after the surrender of Ticonderoga, the second continental congress met at Philadelphia. 1775. There among the delegates appeared Franklin and May 10. Samuel Adams; John Adams and Washington and Richard Henry Lee; soon joined by Patrick Henry, and by George Clinton, Jay, and Jay's college friend, the younger Robert R. Livingston, of New York. They formed no confederacy; they were not an executive government; they were not even a legislative body. They were committees from twelve colonies, deputed to consult on measures of conciliation, with no means of resistance to oppression beyond a voluntary agreement for the suspension of importations from Great Britain. They owed the use of a hall for their sessions to the courtesy of the carpenters of the city; there was not a foot of land on which they had the right to execute their decisions; and they had not one civil officer to carry them out, nor the power to appoint one. Nor was one soldier enlisted, nor one officer commissioned in their name. They had no treasury; and neither authority to lay a tax nor to borrow money. They had been elected, in part at least, by tumultuary assemblies, or bodies which had no recognised legal existence; they were intrusted with no powers but those of counsel; most of them were held back by explicit or implied instructions; and they represented nothing more solid than the unformed opinion of an unformed people. Yet they were encountered by the king's refusal to act as a mediator, the decision of parliament to enforce its authority, and the actual outbreak of civil war. The waters had risen; the old roads were obliterated; and they must strike out a new path for themselves and for the continent. The exigency demanded the instant formation of one great commonwealth and the declaration of independence. "They are in rebellion," said Edmund Burke; "and have done so much as to necessitate them to do a great deal more.' Independence had long been the desire of Samuel Adams, and was already the reluctant choice of Franklin and of John Adams, from a conviction that it could not ultimately be avoided; but its immediate declaration was not possible. American law was the growth of necessity, not of the wisdom of individuals. It was not an acquisition from abroad; it was begotten from the American mind, of which it was a natural and inevitable but also a slow and gradual May 10. development. The sublime thought that there existed 1775. a united nation was yet to spring into being, to liberate the public spirit from allegiance to the past, and summon it to the creation of a state. But, before this could be well done, the new directing intelligence must represent the sum of the intelligence of twelve or thirteen provinces, inhabited by men not of English ancestry only, but intermixed with French, still more with Swedes, and yet more with Dutch and Germans; a society where Quakers, who held it wickedness to fight, stood over against Calvinists, whose religious creed encouraged resistance to tyranny; where freeholders, whose pride in their liberties and confidence in their power to defend the fields which their own hands had reclaimed, were checked by merchants whose treasures were afloat, and who feared a war as the foreboder of their own bankruptcy. Massachusetts might have come to a result with a short time for reflection; but congress must respect masses of men, composed of planters and small manufacturers, of artisans and farmers, one fifth of whom had for their mother tongue some other language than the English. Nor were they only of different nationalities. They were almost exclusively Protestant; but 1775. those who were Protestants professed the most different religious creeds. To all these congress must have regard; and wait for the just solution from a sentiment superior to race and language, planted by God in the heart of mankind. The American constitution is the child of the whole people, and expresses a community of its thought and May 10. will. The nation proceeded not after the manner of inventors of mechanisms, but like the Divine Architect; its work is self-made, and is neither a copy of any thing past, nor a product of external force, but the unfolding of its inmost nature. The Americans were persuaded that they were set apart for the increase and diffusion of civil and religious liberty; chosen to pass through blessings and through trials, through struggles and through joy, to the glorious fulfilment of their great duty of establishing freedom in the New World, and setting up an example to the Old. But, by the side of this creative impulse, the love of the mother country lay deeply seated in the descendants of British ancestry, and this love was strongest in the part of the country where the collision had begun. The attachment was moreover justified; for the best part of their culture was derived from England, which had bestowed on them milder, more tolerant, and more equal governments than the distant colonies of other European powers had known. When congress met, it was as hard to say of its members as of their constituents, whether they were most swayed by loyal attachment to the country from which the most of them sprung, or by the sense of oppression. The parent land which they loved was an ideal England, preserving as its essential character, through all accidents of time and every despotic tendency of a transient ministry, the unchanging attachment to liberty. Of such an England they cherished the language, the laws, and the people; and they would not be persuaded that independence of her was become the only mode of preserving their inherited rights. In this divided state of their affections, the unpreparedness of the country for war, and the imperfection of the powers with which they were intrusted, devotedness to |