that I here wish to emphasize is the feature of representative selfgovernment in the chartered creatures of the Crown. Their power to make their own ordinances, rules and by-laws was complete, not even being subject to the revision of the Crown, nor expressly restricted in terms to conformity to public statutes. And, mirabile dictu, in these days when the establishment of courts of arbitration is denounced as a novelty, they even had the power of establishing their own private courts for the adjustment of disputes between their own members and between their own workmen and employees and themselves.

We have now fairly before us the mechanical political equipment of Englishmen of the early part of the seventeenth century, when American Colonization began. Self-government, expressing itself through organs of representation, was the cardinal principle, characteristic alike of public, quasi public and private corporations. Of course, full development had not been reached, but the principle was there. The intrinsic excellence of the metal, later to be recoined, was there.

Here, the overture ends, and the first part of our trilogy begins. Beneath the mass of institutional equipment there was an uplifting force which put a soul into the affairs of men. It was not alone the spirit of Magna Charta, but Magna Charta with all its provisions for personal liberty fiercely stirred by that Liberty of Conscience and of Thought which was born of the Invention of Printing, of An Open Bible, and of the Era of the Reformation, marked by a destruction of mediæval bonds and a release of the minds of men, turned by the discovery of America to a new and unfettered world. The wilderness was sought not alone in the spirit of adventure and the search for new trades and markets, but with a holy zeal for religious independence. Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey and Pennsylvania were distinctly children of religious freedom.

Of the thirteen colonies seven were Provincial or Royal governments; three were Proprietary, resembling Palatinates, and three were Chartered. Only the latter were democratic in terms; the powers and rights being expressly vested in the colonists, who selected their own Governor, Council and Assembly, though in Massachusetts the Governor was appointed by the King. In the Proprietary governments, the Grantee and his heirs, while hold

ing of the Crown in free and common socage, were Lords of the soil, with power to grant titles of subinfeudation, the statute of Quia Emptores notwithstanding. Full and absolute power was also given the Proprietary to make laws for the raising of money for public uses "by and with the advice and assent and approbation of the freemen of the country or the greater part of them, or of their delegates or deputies, when for the enacting of said laws, when and as aften as need shall require," it was the royal will that "the Proprietor and his heirs shall assemble in such form as to him and them shall seem best." Here was a distinct graft of popular government upon the stock of a proprietary charter. This led to a long conflict between the governors appointed by the Proprietor, and the popular assemblies, which finally secured the right to initiate their own money bills. In the royal colonies, though no rights of popular government were expressly conceded, the people assumed them by the formation of domestic assemblies, the first instance occurring in Virginia in 1619, by a movement which the royal governor was unable to restrain, and “ thus was formed and established," says Mr. Justice Story, "the first representative legislature that ever sat in America."

The influence of the charters of the trading companies, to which I have alluded, upon the colonial charters is plain. Charter privileges in the trading companies were exclusively for the members of the corporations, but emigration with a constantly enlarging body of emigrants compelled an enlargement of the corporation, not technically but in substance. Newly arrived settlers, eager to share the adventures as well as dangers of the wilderness could not be treated by the first settlers as aliens. They were welcomed as brothers in the enterprise. As Thorpe says: "This was the first reform in representation, the first extension of the suffrage." It was common to all the colonies. The unit of political measure, in colonies where Indian hostilities were frequent, was the town. The inhabitants sheltered themselves behind stockades or clung together in villages. Where the population was spread over plantations without the fear of savages, the unit was the country, or, in some colonies, the parish. By 1640 the idea of representation was well established in Massachusetts, and when it was inequitably withheld Roger Williams founded

his Providence Plantation upon the subsequently familiar maxim "that taxation and representation went together." In 1662 the Crown expressly recognized in the Connecticut charter, in 1663 in the Rhode Island charter, and, in 1692 in the amended charter of Massachusetts, the right of the colonies to choose representatives to their local assemblies. In the Proprietary Colonies of Maryland, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, which then included Delaware, the right had been conferred by the frame of laws established under powers authorizing the lords of the soil to legislate "by and with the advice and warrant of the freemen" of the country. After the conquest of New York from the Dutch, the code of laws prepared for the Duke of York by the great Earl of Clarendon embodied the same principles. In New Hampshire a royal commission provided that the Governor should prepare the laws with the approval of his council and the deputies of the people. In the south, Virginia having led the way with her House of Burgesses, her neighboring sisters the Carolinas and Georgia soon followed her example. All this was but a reflex of the struggle which finally cost Charles I his head, aided by the local necessities of situations three thousand miles away from the foot of the throne. The marked features of these movements, however, were not in usurpations of power by the people, but in the insistence of Englishmen, both at home and abroad, upon their ancient and undoubted rights to choose their own representatives.

In short, no matter what the special form of the royal grant, the colonists, who had been bred to representative self-government, relying either upon a clause which declared that they were to "enjoy all the rights, liberties and immunities of Englishmen as if abiding in England," common to all the charters, except, strange to say, in the single instance of Pennsylvania, or else from the very necessities of their situation, set up for themselves representative institutions similar to those with which they had been long familiar. Each little group, whenever and wherever planted, claiming the common law as its birthright, organized its social forces, rooted itself in the soil, drew sustenance from custom and traditions, acquired strength and developed, sometimes rapidly, sometimes slowly, but always surely, a State, in principles, modes of action, polity, nature and even in form, like that from which it sprung.

Edmund Burke in his speech on Conciliation with America stated six capital sources of what he called "a fierce spirit of liberty." First, "the people of the colonies" were "descendants of Englishmen." They were therefore "not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas, and on English principles." Second, "their governments were popular in a high degree," in all" the popular representative is the most weighty." Third, "religion, always a principle of energy, in this new people" was "in no way worn out or impaired. The Colonists left England when this spirit was high, and in the emigrants was the highest of all." Fourth, because even in the Slave States, "fredom being not only an enjoyment but a kind of rank and privilege," those who were "free, are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom." Fifth, education. "In no country in the world is the law so general a study. . . . . I learn," said he," that they have sold nearly as many of Blackstone's Commentaries in America as in England. . . . . They augur misgovernment at a distance, and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze." Sixth, remoteness of situation. "Three thousand miles of ocean lie between you and them. No contrivance can prevent the effect of this distance, in weakening your government. Seas roll, and months pass between the order and the execution."

The first part of the trilogy was at an end.

One hundred and fifty years of the conditions described by Burke had elapsed before England changed her Laissez faire policy. In the meantime the second part of the trilogy had begun with the Era of The English Revolution. I shall not dwell upon it for I had the honor of describing it to you two years ago. Suffice it to say, that in the Petition of Right, addressed to Charles I in 1628, and in the Bill of Rights granted by William and Mary in 1689, we have the text of the Bill of Rights attached by the ten first amendments to the Constitution of the United States, and now a part of every State constitution in our republic. The fame, the words, and the deeds of John Pym, of John Hampden and of Sir Harry Vane were as familiar in America as in England.

It was the example of these men and a repetition in the colonies in kind of the arbitrary acts which Englishmen at home had

fought that inspired James Otis in his impassioned argument against Writs of Assistance to enforce the Acts of Navigation and Trade; that touched the tongue of Patrick Henry with divine fire; that guided the pen of John Dickinson in the Farmer's Letters; that roused Daniel Dulany in his profound legal argument against taxation without representation; that gave Sam Adams his strength and John Adams his opportunity; that sustained the homely but trenchant reasoning of Franklin; that converted Freneau, Trumbull and Hopkinson into satirists, and set pulpits on fire, and made even prisons bellow their protests; that gave John Jay, James Wilson, John Rutledge, Christopher Gadsden and Thomas Jefferson to the Continental Congress, and placed the buff and the blue on the shoulders of Washington. From Chief Justice Drayton charging grand juries in South Carolina, and Tom Paine writing in "The Crisis" of "Times that tried men's souls," to John Witherspoon in New Jersey and Stephen Hopkins in Rhode Island the same argument was on every lip. Under the English Constitution, the birthright of the Colonists, Americans could give and grant assistance to the Crown, if they so voted in their own representative assemblies, but George III could no more take assistance under the revenue pretences of the Stamp Act and the Tea Tax than Charles I could take John Hampden's shillings under the odious guise of ship money. "What right," argued Dulany, "had the Commons of Great Britain to be thus munificent at the expense of the Commons of America? On one point, at least, we are all agreed, that no where can British subjects be taxed except with their own consent given by their representatives. It is not pretended that we have ever elected any members of the House of Commons. How, then, can the members of that House be our representatives?" The argument was in line with the Virginia Resolutions of 1769. It was for Representative government that Puritan and Knickerbocker, Free Quaker and slave owner, corn planter and cotton planter, ship builder and tobacco merchant, sailor and farmer, southern aristocrats and northern traders fought kinsmen once dear, foreswore an allegiance once respected and faced battle fields, prison ships, debt, hunger, cold and disease. It was the victory won for representative government that has made Independence Hall immortal, and the Hills of Valley Forge forever holy.