332 
WISCONSIN STATE AO MI CULTURAL SOCIETY, 
gravitations of power as the appearance of a new planet would in 
the system of the solar world.” 
c/ 
It is easy to understand that the rupture between the colonies 
and the mother country might have worked a result of political in¬ 
dependence that would have involved no such mighty consequences 
as are here so strongly announced by the most philosophic states¬ 
man of his age. The resistance of the colonies, which came to a 
head in the revolt, was led in the uame and for the maintenance of 
the liberties of Englishmen, against parliamentary usurpation and 
a subversion of the British constitution. A triumph of those lib¬ 
erties might have ended in an emancipation from the rule of the 
English parliament, and a continued submission to the scheme and 
system of the British monarchy, with an American parliament ad¬ 
justed thereto, upon the true principles of the English constitution. 
Whether this new political establishment should have maintained 
loyalty to the British sovereign, or should have been organized un¬ 
der a crown and throne of its own, the transaction would, then, 
have had no other importance than such as belongs to a dismember¬ 
ment of existing empire, but with preservation of existing institu¬ 
tions. There would have been, to be sure, a “ new state,” but not 
“ of a new species,” and that it was “ in a new part of the globe ” 
would have gone far to make the dismemberment but a temporary 
and circumstantial disturbance in the old order of things. Indeed, 
the solidity and perpetuity of that order might have been greatly 
confirmed by this propagation of the model of the European mon¬ 
archies on the boundless regions of this continent. It is precisely 
here that the Declaration of Independence has its immense import¬ 
ance. As a civil act, and by the people’s decree — and not by the 
achievement of the army, or through military motives — at the first 
stage of the conflict it assigned a new nationality, with its own in¬ 
stitutions, as the civilly preordained end to be fought for and secur¬ 
ed. It did not leave it to be an after-fruit of triumphant war, 
shaped and measured by military power, and conferred by the army 
on the people. This assured at the outset the supremacy of civil 
over military authority, the subordination of the army to the unarm¬ 
ed people. This deliberative choice of the scope and goal of the 
Revolution made sure of two things, which must have been always 
greatly in doubt, if military reasons and events had held the mast¬ 
ery over the civil power. The first was, that nothing less than the 
