commonwealth. Its object was a single one--defence against a foreign
oppressor. The contracting parties bound themselves together to spend
all their treasure and all their blood in expelling the foreign soldiery
from their soil. To accomplish this purpose, they carefully abstained
from intermeddling with internal politics and with religion. Every man
was to worship God according to the dictates of his conscience. Every
combination of citizens, from the provincial states down to the humblest
rhetoric club, was to retain its ancient constitution. The establishment
of a Republic, which lasted two centuries, which threw a girdle of rich
dependencies entirely round the globe, and which attained so remarkable a
height of commercial prosperity and political influence, was the result
of the Utrecht Union; but, it was not a premeditated result. A state,
single towards the rest of the world, a unit in its external relations,
while permitting internally a variety of sovereignties and institutions--
in many respects the prototype of our own much more extensive and
powerful union--was destined to spring from the act thus signed by the
envoys of five provinces. Those envoys were acting, however, under the
pressure of extreme necessity, and for what was believed an evanescent
purpose. The future confederacy was not to resemble the system of the
German empire, for it was to acknowledge no single head. It was to
differ from the Achaian league, in the far inferior amount of power which
it permitted to its general assembly, and in the consequently greater
proportion of sovereign attributes which were retained by the individual
states. It was, on the other hand, to furnish a closer and more intimate
bond than that of the Swiss confederacy, which was only a union for
defence and external purposes, of cantons otherwise independent. It was,
finally, to differ from the American federal commonwealth in the great
feature that it was to be merely a confederacy of sovereignties,
not a representative Republic. Its foundation was a compact, not a
constitution. The contracting parties were states and corporations,