Growth of Popular Government

never compassed the magnitude of the drama in which their sufferings and their victories were early scenes. They were men much like ourselves, and the emotions that stirred their lives, the services they rendered, the ideas for which they contended, the record which they made in founding new States and a new nation are elemental forces in democracy in America to-day. They bequeathed to us the heritage of representative government.

Time has obscured their action, as it obscures the deeds of all men. But the political institutions which sprang up after them, though feeble and isolated at first, unwelcome to the governments of the Old World, and, when by necessity acknowledged as a new power, coldly received into the family of nations, were destined to overspread a continent and to demonstrate, for the first time, the vitality and efficiency of popular government on a vast scale. During the seventeenth century, and the greater part of the eighteenth, the colonies prospered under charters granted by the Crown and in substance differing little one from another. The charter to Penn contained a unique provision recognizing the right of Parliament to levy a tax on the colony.* Most fateful for the colonies was the privilege of the Assemblies to pass laws that should conform as nearly as possible with the laws of England. Here was the entering

* Charter to Penn, March 4, 1681, sec. 20. Proceedings of conventions of 1776 and 1789. Pennsylvania, Harrisburg, 1825, p. 16.

wedge of democracy in America. Gradually, and it may be said naturally, the Assemblies assumed the right to judge when a law should be more American than English. This claim of right was the foundation of American independence.

From their incorporation, therefore, the colonies, though fairly uniform in general character, tended to differ among themselves in local government. The local spirit was from the first stronger than the continental, and doubtless would have prevailed had not James the Second attempted to merge the colonies into groups, each having its civil system, with ultimate merger in a government whose executive and judiciary should be appointed by the Crown; whose common Assembly, though elected by the people, should be stripped of all discretionary authority. To the colonists this was absolutism, and, consciously or unconsciously, their opposition to it awakened a continental spirit, the parent of the national idea. Thus, before the close of the seventeenth century America was at the threshold of a new civil experience, the distinguishing feature of which was the formulation of the "ancient and undoubted rights of the people of the colonies." A like process was going on in England. The famous Bill of Rights of 1688 is contemporaneous with like measures in the colonies. Americans are more familiar with the political speculations that dominated the country in 1776 than with those, equal in influence, that dominated it nearly a century earlier. One clause of the English bill of 1688 survives in its original form in the

Forebodings of the Revolution

Constitution of the United States,* and in many State constitutions; but it was not accompanied in the seventeenth century by those provisions with which it is now associated. Freedom of worship, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press are rights which were worked out in this countrythat is to say, they were worked out in that AngloSaxon world which is divided into two parts-England and America. They are rights which in no sense are of Celtic or Latin origin. On them, and those soon worked out with them, rests all constitutional government in America. The New York Assembly in 1689, in spite of the opposition of the Crown, set forth for the first time in a formal bill on this continent those rights which became the foundation for political ideas involved in the American Revolution. This Assembly was the parent of that portion of the American constitutions of government which we call the Declaration. of Rights-the most permanent part of our civil system. The ideas involved in them were the issue in the struggle of England, France, and Spain for the possession of America. The first phase of this struggle was international, and closed with the treaty of Paris and the disappearance of New France from the map of America. Thirteen years passed and a new name appeared- the

* Art. viii.

In most of the charters; those of Virginia (1606) and Massachusetts (1629) are typical. The Assemblies early began to "confirm the charters"—i. e., Magna Charta and the Charter of the Forest - as in Rhode Island, 1663; North Carolina, twentyfive times, etc. See Martin's Laws, North Carolina, 1792.

United States.

Colonies had become commonwealths, organized on the basis of these ancient rights which, save in Rhode Island, had been formally adopted as the essential part of a written constitution. Each proposition recorded a victory of democracy over monarchy of individualism over absolutism. Therefore every clause is a survival, in brief, of struggles that go back well towards the earliest moments of recorded time. Bills of rights, the portion of the supreme law which seems to many trite, if not superfluous, are the summary of ages of struggle for human rights. In America, the Virginia bill, compiled chiefly by George Mason, records the close of an initial chapter in the history of democracy. We shall see, later, how the chapter has been continued, and from what sources it is derived. Each generation of Americans has added to it. Individualism--and, later, communalism-are there. In our day the grinding necessity of industrial morality is adding clauses of a nature undreamed of when the New York Assembly enacted its epoch-making bill, or when, a little less than a century later, Mason wrote the Virginia Declaration. In the State constitutions many provisions respecting the legislative, the executive, and the judiciary prove to be temporary. Nearly every provision in the various declarations of rights has proved to be essential to the stability of representative government. The growth of our bills of rights is, therefore, indexical of the charter of the American state.

As France and Spain, in turn, retired from

State Constitutions the Product of Time

North America, the English-speaking race was left with a continent on its hands whereon representative government might freely develop. This opportunity of democracy is without parallel in history. For the first time, as events proved, popular government on a vast scale was to be put to the test. When the transition from colonies to commonwealths came, it seems, at first glance, almost instantaneous. The State constitutions of 1776 seem struck off at a single stroke in a sense that is not true of the national Constitution. A little reflection, however, will demonstrate that the constitutions, State and national, which distinguish America during the last quarter of the eighteenth century are in no sense political miracles or the product of chance or sudden ideas. These instruments must be taken, in the aggregate, as the written form of a political organism long growing and essentially homogeneous. They give the political fabric a common pattern. They register the civil experience, not of the colonists only, but of the people of other and earlier times. They may be called chapters in the Bible of politics contributed by democracy in America. Therefore, they must be considered together as a political unit, whose details are local applications of a few common principles contained in the bills of rights.

These constitutions have a common origin in experience and speculation-the experience chiefly that of the colonists themselves; the speculation that of a few philosophers, of whom Montesquieu