for political subordination.  The colonies were divided from one another by difficulties of communication, by variations in economic conditions and social customs, by divergent interests, and above all by a rampant provincial and separatist spirit.  On the other hand, they were united by a common language, by a common political and legal tradition, and by the fact that none of them had ever been really independent sovereign states.  Nobody dared or cared to object to union in the abstract; nobody advocated the alternative of complete separation; it was only a strong efficient union which aroused the opposition of the Clintons and the Patrick Henrys.  Nevertheless, the conditions making for separation have the appearance of being more insistent and powerful than the conditions making for an effective union.  Disunion was so easy.  Union was so difficult.  If the states had only kept on drifting a little longer, they would, at least for a while, inevitably have drifted apart.  They were saved from such a fate chiefly by the insight and energy of a few unionist leaders—­of whom Washington and Hamilton were the most important.

Perhaps American conditions were such that eventually some kind of a national government was sure to come; but the important point is that when it came, it came as the result of forethought and will rather than of compulsion.  “It seems to have been reserved,” says Hamilton in the very first number of the Federalist, “to the people of this country by their conduct and example, to decide the important question whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”  Americans deliberately selected the better part.  It is true that the evil effects of a loose union were only too apparent, and that public safety, order, and private property were obviously endangered by the feeble machinery of Federal government.  Nevertheless, conditions had not become intolerable.  The terrible cost of disunion in money, blood, humiliation, and hatred had not actually been paid.  It might well have seemed cheaper to most Americans to drift on a little longer than to make the sacrifices and to undertake the labor demanded by the formation of an effective union.  There were plenty of arguments by which a policy of letting things alone could be plausibly defended, and the precedents were all in its favor.  Other people had acquired such political experience as they were capable of assimilating, first by drifting into some intolerable excess or some distressing error, and then by undergoing some violent process of purgation or reform.  But it is the distinction of our own country that at the critical moment of its history, the policy of drift was stopped before a virulent disease had necessitated a violent and exhausting remedy.