A state, single towards the rest of the world, a unit in its external relations, while permitting internally a variety of sovereignties and institutions--in many respects the prototype of our own much more extensive and powerful union--was destined to spring from the act thus signed by the envoys of five provinces.

Those envoys were acting, however, under the pressure of extreme necessity, and for what was believed an evanescent purpose.

The future confederacy was not to resemble the system of the German empire, for it was to acknowledge no single head.

It was to differ from the Achaian league, in the far inferior amount of power which it permitted to its general assembly, and in the consequently greater proportion of sovereign attributes which were retained by the individual states.

It was, on the other hand, to furnish a closer and more intimate bond than that of the Swiss confederacy, which was only a union for defence and external purposes, of cantons otherwise independent.