Page:Review of the Proclamation of President Jackson.djvu/35

 step of the process must necessarily be to prove the pre-existence of a community. Government being superinduced upon this community, it would then become a Nation, so far at least as all the members of that community were concerned. The first point to be proved, then, was the existence of a community composed of all the People who were afterwards to become the subjects of the nation. Now how is this established? "In our colonial state," says the President, "although dependent on another power, we very early considered ourselves connected by common interest with each other." A more flimsy pretext, from which to infer the existence of a single community, could not easily have been selected; and yet a more ingenious mode of getting up this pretext could not well have been devised. Mark, no social connection of any sort, is affirmed to have actually existed; it is merely said, that we very early considered ourselves as connected. And by what was this imaginary connection constituted? Were we inhabitants of a common territory, the vacant and unoccupied parts of which were admitted to belong to all? No.—Did we profess the same religious faith ? No.—Did there exist any one institution, which having been created or preserved by all, was therefore common to all? No.—By what tie then did this People consider themselves to be connected, in their colonial state? Why, by the single tie of a supposed common interest. No man before President Jackson, ever thought of inferring the existence of a community from such a fact, which if believed to be sufficient to produce that effect, would consolidate, probably, one-half the People of the whole world into one community, and by so doing, would dissolve more than the half of all the societies now existing, whose members do not even consider themselves connected by any such tie.

But perhaps it will be said, that I do the President wrong, in supposing that he meant the People when he says "we," that by this personal pronoun he did not mean to denote all the Colonists, in their individual, but in the social characters which they had long had, and which was denoted by the term Colonies. If so, this sentence becomes the simple annunciation of a well-known historical fact, proved by numerous documents in our archives, that even in their colonial state, the several Colonies considered themselves as