Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/126

94 successful claim to the possession of those territories to which her abstract prior title had so long lain dormant, and had been weakened, if not destroyed, by so many capricious grants from the same power by which it was created, yet her position offered strong temptations to pursue the time sanctioned European policy, the policy which European statesmen consider sagacious, which has built up all the great powers of Europe at the expense of their neighbors, and which is pursued now and ever has been pursued throughout the whole history of their diplomacy. That policy would have been to nurse her claims, to hold them as a perpetual thorn in the side of her neighboring States, to prevent the formation of the union, to make herself the great central absorbing power, and gradually to encroach on the lesser States. Such a policy was feared by several of the smaller States, especially by Maryland. Had a monarch ruled the destinies of Virginia, such would have been the inevitable tendency of events. With wealth, population and resources then superior to any of the States, the prospect was certainly alluring, had the ambition of Virginia aimed at empire. But a far different spirit animated her people. Fired with the love of liberty, and struggling for their own freedom from the grasp of Great Britain, no thought entered their minds of aggression against the brethren fighting by their sides. Impelled by this spirit of her people, she devoted her efforts to bind the States in a fraternal compact, to remove all causes of jealousy, and to build up a great and permanent Federal republic, and she hastened to surrender all claims to the territory of her sister States.

The Maryland convention, however, was in no frame of mind to recognize the magnanimity of Virginia. On the 29th of October the Maryland convention entered upon its journal the following note: &quot;This convention, being informed that in the constitution or form of government agreed upon by the delegates of Virginia, a claim is made by them injurious to the inhabitants of