with the governed, the authority of the State is supreme and exclusive. Power over private property, power over personal liberty and security-the right of life and death without appeal -these are the high, the almost unlimited functions of an American State.

And yet these great political communities, independent of each other, and, many of them, with a history dating back more than a century before the United States had a being, must, when their interests come in conflict, instead of resorting to the arts of diplomacy or war, bow to the decision of a civil court, belonging to another government, and which will hear their grievances precisely as it hears those of the humblest citizen.

In the Act passed last year by our General Assembly, inviting New York to appoint commissioners to fix the boundary, provision was made for an appeal to the law, should this over- . ture be declined. This appeal has been taken, and it is more than a coincidence that the suit, just instituted by Connecticut against New York, is in the hands of one of our own townsmen, a distinguished member of the bar of Connecticut, of the same historic family, which, more than any other, has given to that bar its leaders, for many generations, and to which belonged the counsel of the same name, who defended the rights of the State in the early suit, to which I have just alluded, in the last century.

The judgment thus demanded from the Supreme Court cannot fail to settle finally and forever, the dividing lines between these States, by land and sea; and blessed be this peaceful remedy, given by the wise foresight of our fathers---a remedy by which this controversy of two centuries may be ended in a day, not by a compromise,* which (as Irving says of the New Netherlands compact of 1650) is where "one party cedes half of its claims, and the other party half of its rights;" but by the

* The boundary between the States was subsequently settled by an agreement between Commissioners appointed by each, which was duly ratified in 1880-1881 by the two States, with the consent of Congress (21 U. S. Stat. at large, 351); and thereupon the suit in the U. S. Supreme Court was withdrawn.

rules of justice, and the weight of evidence, as they appear to a disinterested arbiter.

America is the only country in which such a court exists-a court for commonwealths. Neither State need fear to submit its cause to a tribunal, the most august in Christendom. Neither loses in dignity when it bows before the great powers which its own consent originally called into being.

Liberty, said Webster, is the creature of law; and it was for this true liberty—a liberty regulated by laws and courts, so that they be American, that our fathers, a hundred years ago, were fighting themselves free from British rule. And wise were the counsels, which after independence was achieved, gave to America a government not only for the people, but for the States; a government national only where necessary; but where necessary, supreme.

THE ECCLESIASTICAL CONSTITUTION

OF YALE COLLEGE.

BY PROFESSOR SIMEON E. BALDWIN.

[Read, April 25th, 1881.]

WE have in this country a few institutions, old enough to have something of a prehistoric and mythical character, attaching to the story of their origin.

Yale College is one of these, with its legend of the ten ministers, meeting at Branford in the first year of the last century, each bringing with him a few volumes from his scanty library, and declaring, as he laid them down in the presence of the rest, "I give these books for the founding a College in this Colony;" and with its still more shadowy traditions, that the first impulse to this renewal of a long abandoned hope was derived from Massachusetts, and due to the dissatisfaction of the stricter Calvinists in that Colony with the theological views prevailing at Harvard.

One of the leading historical figures of early New England was Samuel Sewall, whose gossiping diary has recently been printed by the Massachusetts Historical Society. Originally educated for the ministry, he soon turned his attention to politics and government, and at the close of the seventeenth century was one of the foremost men in the Colony of Massa

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chusetts Bay; high in office, hospitable, generous, philanthropic, and public-spirited. In 1699, he was chosen one of the Commissioners of the Society for Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts for New England, and soon became one of its main pillars.

At this time, it would seem that there was less strictness in the mode of teaching divinity at Cambridge than in the preceding generation, when Sewall was a student there, under President Chauncy. There was nothing in its charter to secure the control of the College in the hands of any religious denomination, and a new charter, providing that no one should be President or Fellow, unless he was and "continued to be" a Congregationalist or Presbyterian, had just been defeated (1699) by the veto of Governor Bellomont,* on account of this particular provision, "made," as Cotton Mather sorrowfully writes, that day, in his diary, "for the religion of the country."+

A letter written to Judge Sewall in 1723 (soon after Rector Cutler had gone over to the Church of England), by Rev. Moses Noyes of Lyme, who had then been a Trustee of Yale College for twenty years, deploring a tendency among the students here towards "Arminian and Prelatical notions," refers thus to the original motives of its foundation :

"The first movers for a College in Connecticut alledged this as a reason, because the College at Cambridge was under the Tutorage of Latitudinarians; but how well they have mended, the event sadly manifests."+

With these first movers, though Mr. Noyes does not seem to know it, Judge Sewall had been in confidential and friendly communication at the very outset. It was to him that they applied, at least as early as August, 1701, for advice in regard to the general scheme for the new institution, and for the proper form of an Act, to submit to the Colonial legislature, in the nature of a College charter.

In the first letter which has been preserved, from Judge Sewall on this subject, addressed to Mr. Pierpont of New * Quincy's History of Harvard University, vol. i, pp. 100, 197.

+ Id., p. 483.

Woolsey's Historical Discourse, p. 99.