alteration, at least in Massachusetts, in the qualifications of voters. "There is no good government," he said, "but what is republican; for a republic is an empire of laws, and not of men;" and, to constitute the best of republics, he enforced the necessity of separating the executive, legislative, and judicial powers. The ill use which the royal governors had made of the veto power did not confuse his judgment; he upheld the principle that the chief executive magistrate ought to be invested with a negative upon the legislature. To judges he wished to assign commissions during good behavior, and to establish their salaries by law, but to make them liable to impeachment and removal by the grand inquest of the colony.

The republics of the ancient world had grown out of cities, so that their governments were originally municipalities; to make a republic possible in the large territories embraced in the several American colonies, where the whole society could never be assembled, power was to be deputed by the many to a few, who were to be elected by suffrage, and were in theory to be a faithful miniature portrait of the people. Nor yet should all power be intrusted to one representative assembly. John Adams taught, what an analysis of the human mind and the examples of history through thousands of years unite to confirm, that a single assembly is liable to the frailties of a single individual, to passionate caprices, and to a selfish eagerness for the increase of its own importance. "If the legislative power," such were his words just as the American constitutions were forming, "if the legislative power is wholly in one assembly, and the executive in another or in a single person, these two powers will oppose and encroach upon each other, until the contest shall end in war, and the whole power, legislative and executive, be usurped by the strongest."

These are words to be inscribed on the memory and heart of every nation that would constitute a republic; yet at that time there was not one member of the continental congress who applied the principle to the continental congress itself. Hawley of Northampton had advised an American parliament with two houses of legislature; but John Adams as yet saw no occasion for any continental constitution except a congress, which should contain a fair representation of the colo

nies, and confine its authority sacredly to war, trade, disputes between colony and colony, the post-office, and the unappropriated public lands.

In the separate colonies, he urged that all the youth should be liberally educated, and all men be required to keep arms and to be trained to their use. A country having a constitution founded on these principles, diffusing knowledge among the people, and inspiring them with the conscious dignity becoming free men, would, "when compared with the regions of monarchical or aristocratical domination, seem an Arcadia or an Elysium."

CHAPTER XXII.

BRITAIN SEEKS FOREIGN AID.

1775-1776.

COULD the king have employed none but British troops, the war by land against the colonies must have been of short duration. Sir Joseph Yorke, the British ambassador at the Hague, proposed the transfer of a brigade from the service of the Netherlands to that of his sovereign. The young stadholder made reply directly to his cousin, the king of England, declining the request. King George renewed his solicitation. In 1599, the Low Countries pledged to Queen Elizabeth as security for a loan three important fortresses, which she garrisoned with her own troops; in 1616 the Dutch discharged the debt, and the garrisons were withdrawn from the cautionary towns, except an English and a Scottish brigade which passed into the service of the United Provinces. William III. recalled the English brigade, and in 1749 the privilege of recruiting in Scotland was withdrawn from the other, so that its rank and file, consisting of more than twenty-one hundred men, were of all nations, though its officers were still Scotchmen by birth or descent. In favor of the loan of these troops, it was urged that the officers already owed allegiance to the British king; that common interests connected the two countries; that the present occasion offered to the prince of Orange "the unique advantage and particular honor" of strengthening the bonds of close friendship which had been "more or less enfeebled" by the neutrality of the United Provinces during the last French war.

In the states general Zealand and Utrecht consented; the

province of Holland objected that a commercial state should never but from necessity become involved in any quarrel. Baron van der Capellen tot den Pol, one of the nobles of Overyssel, reasoned in this wise: Furnishing the troops would be a departure from the true policy of the strictest neutrality; the country has fruitlessly sacrificed her prosperity to advance the greatness of England; she has shed rivers of blood under pretence of establishing a balance of power, and has only strengthened an empire which is now assuming a more dreadful monarchy over the seas than ever had been known; she will find herself, as formerly, engaged in a baleful war with France, her most powerful neighbor and her natural ally in the defence of the liberty of commerce; a rupture between Britain and France will bring advantage to the navigation of the republic if she would but maintain her neutrality; in the war of succession which gave to Britain the key to the Mediterranean, she had nothing for her share but the total waste of her forces and her treasure; she has religiously observed her treaties, and yet England denies her the stipulated safety of merchandise in free bottoms, and searches and arbitrarily confiscates her ships. Besides, janizaries rather than the troops of a free state should be hired to subdue the colonists. Why should a nation of men, who have borne the title of rebels and freed themselves from oppression by their swords, employ their troops in crushing the Americans, who yet are worthy of the esteem of the whole world as defending with moderation and with intrepidity the rights which God and not the British legislature has given them as men!

These ideas, once set in motion, were sure to win the day; but the states of Overyssel suppressed all explicit declarations against England; and the states general disguised their refusal under the form of a consent to lend the brigade, on the condition that it never should be used out of Europe.

During the tardy course of the discussion Britain had obtained supplies of men from Germany. The electors and landgraves and reigning dukes of that empire were so accustomed to hire out their troops for their personal profit, that German troops had been engaged in every great contest which raged from Poland to Lisbon, from the North

Sea to Naples, and were sometimes arrayed in the same battle on opposite sides.

So soon as it became known that the king of England desired recruits from Germany, crowds of adventurers volunteered their aid. He had scruples about accepting their offers, saying: "The giving commissions to German officers to get men, in plain English, amounts to making me a kidnapper, which I cannot think a very honorable occupation;" but he continued a contract with a Hanoverian lieutenant-colonel for raising four thousand recruits in Germany, granting for the purpose the use of his electoral dominions and the "indispensably necessary assistance and support of his field marshal."

A larger bounty, higher wages, and the undefined prospect of spoils in the "El Dorado" of America, attracted vagabond veterans to the British standard. The German diet had forbidden enlistments by foreign powers in any part of Germany; the court of Vienna wrote to the free cities and several of the states of the empire, that "Great Britain had no more connection with the empire than Russia or Spain, neither of which powers was permitted to recruit within its limits," and ordered its ministers to obstruct the recruiting officers in the British service; yet the king's contractor was very soon ready with an instalment of a hundred and fifty men, and promised rapid success when the enterprise should get a little better into train. The prince bishop of Liége and the elector of Cologne consented to shut their eyes to the presence of English agents, who had recruiting stations in Neuwied and at Frankfort. The undertaking was prohibited by the law of nations and of the empire; the British ministers therefore instructed their diplomatic representative at the small courts to give all possible aid to the execution of the service, but not to implicate their government. In this way foreign levies were obtained to fill up British regiments.

The British ministry openly sought to engage subsidiary troops in Germany. The elector of Saxony put aside the thought at its first suggestion, saying that "to send part of his army into the remote countries of the New World affected too nearly his paternal tenderness for his subjects,