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America’s First Constitutions and Declarations of Rights
makes them sober, industrious, and frugal. You will find among them
some elegance, perhaps, but more solidity; a little pleasure, but a great
deal of business; some politeness, but more civility. If you compare such
a country with the regions of domination, whether monarchical or aristocratical, you will fancy yourself in Arcadia or Elysium.
If the colonies should assume governments separately, they should be
left entirely to their own choice of the forms; and if a continental constitution should be formed, it should be a congress, containing a fair and
adequate representation of the colonies, and its authority should sacredly
be confined to those cases, namely, war, trade, disputes between colony
and colony, the post-office, and the unappropriated lands of the crown, as
they used to be called.
These colonies, under such forms of government, and in such a union,
would be unconquerable by all the monarchies of Europe.
You and I, my dear friend, have been sent into life at a time when the
greatest lawgivers of antiquity would have wished to live. How few of
the human race have ever enjoyed an opportunity of making an election
of government, more than of air, soil, or climate, for themselves or their
children! When, before the present epocha, had three millions of people
full power and a fair opportunity to form and establish the wisest and
happiest government that human wisdom can contrive? I hope you will
avail yourself and your country of that extensive learning and indefatigable industry which you possess, to assist her in the formation of the
happiest governments and the best character of a great people. For myself, I must beg you to keep my name out of sight; for this feeble attempt,
if it should be known to be mine, would oblige me to apply to myself
those lines of the immortal John Milton, in one of his sonnets:—
‘‘I did not prompt the age to quit their clogs
By the known rules of ancient liberty,
When straight a barbarous noise environs me
Of owls and cuckoos, asses, apes, and dogs.’’