for self-government. In Connecticut it was the towns that created the commonwealth; and the consequent federative idea has steadily influenced the colony and State alike. In Connecticut, the governing principle, due to the original constitution of things rather than to the policy of the commonwealth, has been that the town is the residuary legatee of political power; that it is the State which is called upon to make out a clear case for powers to which it lays claim; and that the towns have a prima facie case in their favor wherever a doubt arises.

All this is so like the standard theory of the relations of the States to the federal government that it is necessary to notice the peculiar exactness with which the relations of Connecticut towns to the commonwealth are proportioned to the relations of the common wealth to the United States. In other States, power runs from the State upwards and from the State downwards; in Connecticut, the towns have always been to the commonwealth as the commonwealth to the Union. It was to be the privilege of Connecticut to keep the notion of this federal relation alive until it could be made the fundamental law of all the commonwealths in 1787-89. In this respect, the life principle of the American Union may be traced straight back to the primitive union of the three little settlements on the bank of the Connecticut River. All this, however, may be left to the

chapter on the Convention of 1787. The point in question here is the introduction of the democratic element into the American system, and the claims of Connecticut to the credit or responsibility for it.

The first constitution of Connecticut the first written constitution, in the modern sense of the term, as a permanent limitation on governmental power, known in history, and certainly the first American constitution of government to embody the democratic idea was adopted by a general assembly, or popular convention, of the planters of the three towns, held at Hartford, January 14, 1638 (9). The common opinion is that democracy came into the American system through the compact made in the cabin of the Mayflower, though that instrument was based on no political principle whatever, and began with a formal acknowledgment of the king as the source of all authority. It was the power of the crown "by virtue" of which "equal laws" were to be enacted, and the "covenant" was merely a makeshift to meet a temporary emergency: it had not a particle of political significance, nor was democracy an impelling force in it. It must be admitted that the Plymouth system was accidentally democratic, but it was from the absence of any great need for government, or for care to preserve homogeneity in religion, not from political purpose, as in Connecticut. It was a pas

which the superior numbers of the freemen could control, to the functions of a mere electing body, leaving to the assistants, what the charter did not give them, the duties of making and enforcing laws. The first meeting of the Court of Assistants in Massachusetts made the support of the clergy a commonwealth matter; the second assumed control of the admission of inhabitants to the towns; and, early in 1632, the settlement of town boundaries, and the control of town interests, were assumed by the assistants without any authority, either from the charter or from the towns. Secular and ecclesiastical influences were strong enough to induce the freemen, in 1630, to confirm the usurped powers of the Court of Assistants; and this was followed in the next year by the exclusion of all but church-members from "the liberties of the Commonwealth," that is, from voting. So wide was the effect that Hutchinson asserts, and Judge Story approves the estimate, that five-sixths of the people were still disfranchised as late as 1676. The whole system was upheld by Governor Winthrop of Massachusetts, in a letter to Hooker, on the ground that it was unwarrantable and unsafe to refer matters "of counsel or judicature" to the body of the people, because "the best part is always the least, and of that best part the wiser part is always the lesser." The people, or that better part of them who should be admitted to vote, were to choose

the Court of Assistants; but that wiser body was to make the laws and enforce them.

Such a system was certain to arouse dissatisfaction; and a due regard to the fact will make it easier to understand why the Massachusetts charter was finally lost so tamely. Dissatisfaction, to the honor of the Massachusetts freemen, first took the shape of assertion of local liberty, of town freedom rather than of individual freedom. There were attempts at independent town action before 1634; but the curious and perhaps significant fact is that nearly all of them took place in the three towns which afterwards made up the Connecticut secession. The towns in 1634 informally sent two deputies each to Boston to get a sight of the patent. The sight was enough to expose the usurpation of the assistants; and at the general court in May the freemen would make no elections until their deputies had been recognized as a factor in the government. Nevertheless, influence, and particularly that of the ministers, was still strong enough to secure the passage of an act, the very next year, constituting a council for life, consisting at first of three members, but meant to be larger in future. There is every indication of an organized design to establish an hereditary order, or at least a life privilege for certain classes, in order to attract influential and wealthy immigrants from the mother country; but luckily Massachusetts freemen knew how to cut the knot. When it

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was proposed in 1639 to give the governor a life tenure, the freemen answered by taking all "magistratical" powers from the council, and that body died the death soon after. Time would fail in telling the further details of the struggle, the success of the deputies in maintaining that share in the government which the charter had not given them; the efforts of the assistants to secure the negative voice,” by which they were to have a veto on the deputies; the famous "sow business," which convulsed the colony, and brought the "negative voice" into common disrepute; and the final compromise in 1644, by which the introduction of a bi-cameral system gave both the assistants and the deputies a negative voice. All these belong to Massachusetts history, and were the efforts of democracy to get its head out of water.

In every point, the ministers had been on the side of the assistants. The latter had always been willing to refer every disputed question to the elders, and had always been supported. The standing grievance had been that the assistants would not admit the right of the general court (which really meant the deputies, or the freemen whom they represented) to adopt a body of laws as a permanent limitation on the judicial powers of the assistants; they wished to decide every case “on its own merits." Winthrop himself acknowledged, in 1639, that the people "had long desired a body of laws, and thought their condition very unsafe