OF THE BOSTON TEA PARTY 169 
sorely needed within three months, there was no help 
for it. Hence the slowness and feebleness with which 
the War of Independence was conducted. When the 
Congress asked for an army of ninety thousand men 
for the year 1777, the demand was moderate and could 
have been met without a greater strain than was cheer- 
fully borne during pur Civil War; but the army fur- 
nished in response never reached thirty thousand, 
and the following years made even a poorer show. 
Our statesmen were then learning by hard experience 
exactly what the royal governors had learned before, — 
that work of continental dimensions, such as a great 
foreign war, required a continental government to 
conduct it, and that no government is worthy of the 
name unless it can raise money by taxation. After the 
peace of 1783 our statesmen were soon taught by 
abundant and ugly symptoms that in the absence of 
such a government the states were in imminent danger 
of falling apart and coming to blows with each other. 
It was only this greater dread that drove our people 
to do most reluctantly in 1788 what they had scorn- 
fully refused to do in 1754, and consent to the estab- 
lishment of a continental government with taxing 
power. Let us not forget, then, that from first to 
last the difficulty was one and the same. 
If we had surmounted the difficulty in 1754, the 
separation from Great Britain might perhaps not 
have occurred at all. In that year the prospect of 
an immediate renewal of war with France made it 
necessary to confer with the chiefs of the Six Nations, 
and in the congress that assembled at Albany Benjamin 
Franklin proposed a plan which, had it been adopted, 
would doubtless have surmounted the difficulty. It 
