"The preservation of the states in a certain degree of agency is indispensable. It will produce that collision between the different authorities which should be wished for in order to check each other. To attempt to abolish the states altogether, would degrade the councils of our country, would be impracticable, would be ruinous. [John Dickinson] compared the proposed national system to the solar system, in which the states were the planets, and ought to be left to move freely in their proper orbits. . . . If the state governments were excluded from all agency in the national one, and all power drawn from the people at large, the consequence would be, that the national government would move in the same direction as the state governments now do, and would run into all the same mischiefs [troubles]."John Dickinson, delegate from Delaware, summary of a speech at the Constitutional Convention from the notes of James Madison, 1787QuestionThe principle of federalism embodied in the United States Constitution had most in common with which of the following earlier aspects of British colonial government?

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