WllAT THE AGE OWES TO AMERICA. 
333 
independence of the nation, and its separation from the system of 
Europe, would be attained if our arms were prosperous; and the 
second, that the new nation would always be the mistress of its own 
institutions. This might not have been its fate had a triumphant 
army won the prize of independence, not as a task set for it by the 
people, and done in its service, but by its own might, and held by 
its own title, and so to be shaped and dealt with by its own will. 
OBJECTS OF THE REVOLUTION. 
There is the best reason to think that the congress which declar¬ 
ed our independence gave its chief solicitude, not to the hazards of 
military failure, not to the chance of miscarriage in the project of 
separation from England, but to the grave responsibility of the mil¬ 
itary success— of which they made no doubt — and as to what 
should replace, as government to the new nation, the monarchy of 
England, which they considered as gone to them forever from the 
date of the declaration. 
Nor did this congress feel any uncertainty, either in disposition 
or expectation, that the natural and necessary result would preclude 
the formation of the new government out of any other materials 
than such as were to be found in society as established on this side 
of the Atlantic. These materials they foresaw were capable of, and 
would tolerate, only such political establishment as would maintain 
and perpetuate the equality and liberty always enjoyed in the sev¬ 
eral colonial communities. 
But all these limitations upon what was possible still left a large 
range of anxiety as to what was probable, and might become actual. 
One thing was too essential to be left uncertain, and the founders 
of this nation determined that there never should be a moment 
when the several communities of the different colonies should lose 
the character of component parts of one nation. By their planta¬ 
tion and growth up to the day of the Declaration of Independence 
they were subjects of one sovereignty, bound together in one poli¬ 
tical connection, parts of one country, under one constitution, with 
one destiny. Accordingly the declaration, by its very terms, made 
the act of separation a dissolving by “ one people ” of “ the political 
bands that have connected them with another,” and the proclama¬ 
tion of the right and of the fact of independent nationality was, 
