The time was not ripe for any such union, and the reason was apparent.
The colonies differed very much in the character of their populations,
in the nature of their economic interests, and in their political
antecedents. They were not wholly of the English race. Many nations in
Europe had already contributed to the population. For example, New York
was partly Dutch, and in Pennsylvania there was a considerable element
of the Swedes, Germans, and Swiss. Moreover, the colonists were as
widely separated from each other, measured by the facilities of
locomotion, as are the most remote nations of the world to-day. Only a
few men ever found occasion to leave their colony to journey to another,
and most men never left, from birth to death, the community in which
they lived. Outside of the few scattered communities in the different
colonies there was an almost unbroken wilderness, with few wagon roads
and in places only a bridle path. The only methods of communication were
the letters and still fewer newspapers, which were carried by post
riders often through an almost trackless wilderness.

Obviously, a working government could not easily be constituted between
peoples of different religions, races, and economic interests, who, for
the most part, never met each other face to face and with whom frequent
communication was impossible.

The differences between the colonies and the mother-country with respect
to internal taxation slowly developed into an issue of constitutionalism
rather than of legislative policy. As in England, the immediate question
affected the power of the Crown to give to the customs inspectors the
power to make general searches and seizures, to enforce the navigation
laws. In 1761 James Otis, of Massachusetts, made a fateful speech before
the colonial legislature, in which, asserting the illegality of the
search warrants on the ground that they violated the constitutional