God to dissolve that government and to institute another. Then,
in the name and by the authority of the good people of the
colonies, they pronounced the dissolution of their allegiance to
the king, and their eternal separation from the nation of Great
Britain--and declared the United Colonies independent States.
And here as the representatives of the one people they had
stopped. They did not require the confirmation of this act, for
the power to make the declaration had already been conferred
upon them by the people, delegating the power, indeed,
separately in the separate colonies, not by colonial authority,
but by the spontaneous revolutionary movement of the people
in them all.

From the day of that Declaration, the constituent power of the
people had never been called into action. A confederacy had
been substituted in the place of a government, and State
sovereignty had usurped the constituent sovereignty of the
people.

The Convention assembled at Philadelphia had themselves
no direct authority from the people. Their authority was all
derived from the State Legislatures. But they had the Articles
of Confederation before them, and they saw and felt the
wretched condition into which they had brought the whole
people, and that the Union itself was in the agonies of death.
They soon perceived that the indispensably needed powers
were such as no State government, no combination of them,
was by the principles of the Declaration of Independence
competent to bestow. They could emanate only from the
people. A highly respectable portion of the assembly, still