A NEW NATION. 315 "The better to secure and perpetuate mutual friendship and inter- course among the people of the different States in this Union the free inhabitants of each of these States . . . shall be entided to 2^ privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several States ; and the people of each State shall have free ingress and regress to and from any other State, and shall enjoy therein all the privileges of trade and commerce, subject to the same duties, impositions, and restrictions as the inhab- itants thereof respectively." ^ There is one further fact which should be noted in regard to the several State Constitutions, — all of which were framed and in force prior to 178 1, — namely, that in many of them, notably those of Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and North Carolina, there was a provision declaring that the people of the State ought to have the sole right of regulating the internal government and police thereof From 1 78 1 until 1787, when our present Constitution was framed, the evils which existed were many and serious ; so much so that the country was drifting toward, if not on the verge of anarchy.2 Among these evils was the inability of the Congress to raise money to pay its debts or meet its expenses. Another was its powerlessness to provide the country with sound money, and still another its inability to secure from the States the performance of the several Treaties which had been made with England and Euro- pean powers. The currency of the country was entirely disor- ganized. Still other evils were caused by the jealousies existing among the several States, leading to commercial quarrels and almost to actual warfare between different States. But the effect of all this was to increase rather than diminish the feeling of State independence. The character of the Federal Government, more- over, thus far had not been such as to invite any one to rely upon it for protection of any class of rights whatsoever. Congress having under the Articles of Confederation no power to act directly upon the people, but only upon the States, had practically no power at all, and after the close of the war became more and more incapable of performing any valuable service to the country. Such then, in brief, was the condition of things when the fifty- 1 Bryce, The American Commonwealth, Vol. I. p. 662. 2 See Fiske, Critical Period of American History, Chapter IV.
