The whole assembly consisted of only fifty-five members, representing twelve sovereign and distinct communities.[455] That so small a body should have contained so large a number of statesmen of preëminent ability is a striking proof of the nature of the crisis which called it into existence. The age which had witnessed the Revolution, and the wants and failures that succeeded it, produced and trained these great men, made them capable of the highest magnanimity, and gave them the intellectual power necessary to surmount the difficulties that obstructed the progress of their country to prosperity and renown. These, with a few of their contemporaries at that moment engaged in other spheres of public duty, are the men who illustrate and adorn it, and the knowledge of their lives and actions is of unspeakable importance to the people of the United States.
To that people is committed a trust, which imposes upon them a greater responsibility than now rests upon any other people on the globe. They possess a written and exact constitution of government, framed with great wisdom by their own deputed agents, and deliberately adopted and enacted by themselves. That Constitution rules over a country of vast extent, inhabited by more than twenty millions of prosperous and intelligent freemen, who constitute one of the first nations of the world. Nowhere on the face of the globe has the experiment of self-government—that experiment so rarely tried, so rarely successful, and so important to the welfare of mankind—been conducted on a scale so grand and imposing. To prevent a failure so disastrous to the best interests of the human race as the failure of that experiment here must inevitably become; to guard this Constitution, the work of their own hands, from every kind of attack; to administer it in the wise spirit in which it was framed; to draw from it the blessings which it was designed to confer; to unfold, to cherish, and to defend its great principles for the benefit of a countless posterity;—this is the high duty imposed by a noble ancestry and an overruling Providence upon the people of this Union of each succeeding generation.
It calls upon them, with a remonstrance in whose tones there is both a warning and a cheering voice, to remember that they have a country; to appreciate and fearlessly to survey the truth, that national honor and success, internal tranquillity and peace, reputation abroad and safety at home, can exist, for them, only under the Union which the Divine government, for its own all-wise purposes, has made a necessity of their condition; and to see that the ruin of self-government in America must involve its ruin for the whole world.[456]
APPENDIX.
IN CONGRESS.
Circular Letter of Congress recommending the Adoption of the Articles of Confederation.