The Ordinance of 1787 decreed
that the new States should stand in every respect on an equal footing
with the old; and yet should be individually bound together with them.
This was something entirely new in the history of colonization. Hitherto
every new colony had either been subject to the parent state, or
independent of it. England, Holland, France, and Spain, when they
founded colonies beyond the sea, founded them for the good of the parent
state, and governed them as dependencies. The home country might treat
her colonies well or ill, she might cherish and guard them, or oppress
them with harshness and severity, but she never treated them as equals.
Russia, in pushing her obscure and barbarous conquest and colonization
of Siberia,--a conquest destined to be of such lasting importance in the
history of Asia,--pursued precisely the same course.
In fact, this had been the only kind of colonization known to modern
Europe. In the ancient world it had also been known, and it was only
through it that great empires grew. Each Roman colony that settled in
Gaul or Iberia founded a city or established a province which was
tributary to Rome, instead of standing on a footing of equality in the
same nation with Rome.
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