Page:History of the United States of America, Spencer, v1.djvu/441

 aristocracies. Massachusetts Bay was an approximation to the complex government of the parent state. Connecticut and Rhode Island were little remote from democracies. But as in the course of our recent war with Great Britain, her gallant naval warriors made the discovery that the frigates of the United States were line-of-battle ships in disguise, so the ministers of George III., when they brought their king and country into collision with these transatlantic dependencies, soon found to their astonishment, that the United American Colonies were republics in disguise. The spirit of the people, throughout the Union, was republican; and the absurdity of a foreign and a royal head to societies of men thus constituted, had remained unperceived, only because until then that head had been seldom brought into action.

The Declaration of Independence announced the severance of the thirteen United Colonies from the rest of the British Empire, and the existence of their people from that day forth as an independent nation. The people of all the colonies, speaking by their representatives, constituted themselves one moral person before the face of their fellowmen. Frederic I., of Brandenburg, constituted himself king of Prussia, by putting a crown upon his own head. Napoleon Bonaparte invested his brows with the iron crown of Lombardy, and declared himself king of Italy. The Declaration of Independence was the crown with which the people of United America, rising in gigantic stature as one man, encirled their brows, and there it remains; there, so long as this globe shall be inhabited by human beings, may it remain, a crown of imperishable glory! The Declaration of Independence asserted the rights, and acknowledged the obligations of an independent nation. It recognized the laws of nations, as they were observed and practiced among Christian communities. It considered the state of nature between nations as a state of peace; and, as a necessary consequence, that the new confederacy was at peace with all other nations, Great Britain alone excepted. It made no change in the laws—none in the internal administration of any one of the confederates, other than such as necessarily followed from the dissolution of the connection with Great Britain. It left all municipal legislation, all regulation of private individual rights and interests, to the people of each separate colony; and each separate colony, thus transformed into a State of the Union, wrought for itself a constitution of government. 