qualifications, as that a person who had been fined or whipped for any scandalous offense should not vote until the court should manifest its satisfaction. For a time, most of the same Colonies limited the suffrage to Church members. As a rule Roman Catholics were excluded from voting. Quakers were sometimes, but not generally, disqualified in terms, but their hesitation to take oaths often had that result. The rule was that an elector must be twenty-one years of age. Custom excluded women, but not the law save in Virginia. There were also residential qualifications, while property qualifications appear to have been universal. The Massachusetts charter of 1691 provided that no person should vote for members to serve in the General Court unless he had a freehold estate in land to the value of forty shillings per annum at the least, or other estate to the value of forty pounds sterling. Many of the Colonies required a freehold estate, some of them laying less stress on its value than on its size. Thus, Virginia confined the suffrage to freeholders who had fifty acres of untilled land, or twenty-five acres with a plantation including a house twelve feet square.

In New England freeman was originally a technical term, and it continued such in Connecticut and Rhode Island until the present century. "A freeman did not become such unless he possessed certain prescribed qualifications, and until he had been approved, admitted, and sworn." When that had been done, "his position was analogous to that of a freeman in a city or borough, and as such he became entitled to the exercise of the right of the elective franchise."1

This outline of Colonial Government will be all the more intelligible and instructive when followed by a similar one of the government of England.

88. The Saxon Township.-The unit of political organization in England is the township. Its original must be sought in the vil

1 See Bishop, Cortland F.: History of Elections in the American Colonies. Columbia College, 1893. The above paragraphs in relation to suffrage are compiled from this monograph.

lage community and mark of Germany; the community being a social organization occupying the mark, as its home was called. The original bond was blood-relationship. "As they fought side by side on the field," says Mr. Green, "so they dwelt side by side on the soil. Harling abode by Harling, and Billing by Billing, and each 'wick' and 'ham' and 'stead' and 'ton' took its name from the kinsmen who dwelt in it. In this way, the house or 'ham' of the Billings was Billingham, and the town or township of the Harlings was Harlington." In the course of time, considerable changes were made in this primitive society. As a factor in the Feudal system, it became the manor subject to a lord; as a factor in the Church system, the parish presided over by a priest. But the township has never ceased to be the primary unit of the English constitution. Mr. Green thus describes the Saxon township government:

"The life, the sovereignty, of the settlement was solely in the body of the freemen whose holdings lay round the moot-hill, or the sacred tree, where the community met from time to time to order its own industry and to make its own laws. Here new settlers were admitted to the freedom of the township, and by-laws framed and head-men and tithing-men chosen for its governance. Here ploughland and meadow-land were shared in due lot among all the villagers, and field and homestead passed from man to man by the delivery of a turf cut from its soil. Here strife of farmer with farmer was settled according to the customs of the township as its eldermen stated them, and four men were chosen to follow headman or ealdorman to hundred-court or war.' 2

89. The Hundred.-In Saxon England, as in ancient Germany, the townships were incorporated into the hundred, the head-man of which was the hundred-man, elder, or reeve. Here appeared the principle of representation, the germ of republican government. Says Mr. Green :

"The four or ten villagers who followed the reeve of each township to the general muster of the hundred, were held to represent the whole body of the township from whence they came. Their voice was its voice, their doing its doing, their pledge its pledge. The hundred moot, a moot which was made by this gathering of the representatives of the townships that lay within its bounds, thus became at once a court of appeal from the moots of each separate village, as well as of arbitration in dispute between township and township."

3

Although the hundred fell out of place in England, the name appears in the history of several of the American States.

1 The Making of England, p. 182.

2 Ibid, pp. 187, 188,

3 History of the English People, Vol. I., p. 14.

90. The Shire or County.- This was an aggregation of hundreds. The head-man of the shire was at first styled the elderman or alderman; afterwards the shire-reeve, or the sheriff, appeared as the special representative of the King. The shire-moot was rather a judicial than a political body. Mr. Green thus describes the latter form of the shire-moot:

"The local knighthood, the yeomanry, the husbandmen of the county, were all represented in the crowd that gathered round the sheriff, as, guarded by his liveried followers, he published the King's writs, announced his demands of aids, received the presentment of criminals and the inquest of the local jurors, assessed the taxation of each district, or listened solemnly to appeals for justice, civil and criminal, from all who held themselves oppressed in the lesser courts of the hundred or the soke. . . In all cases of civil or criminal justice the twelve sworn assessors of the sheriff, as members of a class, though not formerly deputed for that purpose, practically represented the judicial opinion of the county at large. From every hundred came groups of twelve sworn deputies, the jurors through whom the presentments of the district were made to the royal officer, and with whom the assessment of its share in the general taxation was arranged.'

"1

91. The Kingdom of England.—The Saxon invaders founded many dominions in Britain; in due time, these dominions were united into one kingdom under the name of England, the completed union dating from the ninth century. This kingdom was composed of the shires or counties, and was governed by the King and his Council, which was a representative body consisting of the aldermen, the bishops, whose dioceses at first coincided with the shires, and the royal thegus, or nobles whom the King had created. The Council was called the Witenagemot, or Council of the Wise. From this simple government, the present imperial system of Great Britain was progressively developed. The council proper became the lawmaking authority, the King the law-executing authority. The single assembly became the two legislative houses, the House of Lords and the House of Commons, the one representing the aristocratic and the other the popular elements of the State. A wellknown statute in the 25th Edward I. declared that "no tallage or aid" (that is, tax) should be taken or levied without the good will and assent of Parliament, composing the archbishops, bishops, earls, barons, knights, burgesses, and other freemen of the land. In time the power to vote all supplies was expressly limited to the Commons. The power to decide certain cases at law that the King and Council at first possessed, passed to a cycle of courts, except that 1 History of the English People, I., 353.

the House of Lords continued to retain a certain appellate jurisdiction. When this evolution was completed, the three functions of government had been committed to three separate branches or departments: the legislative to Parliament, the executive to the Crown, and the judicial to the Courts of Law. The Crown finally lost its veto on legislation; but about the time when the veto became obsolete, a practical working connection between the Legislature and the Executive was effected by means of the device called the Ministry, and sometimes the Administration and the Government. It is to be said, however, that all these lines had not been clearly drawn when the English Plantations were established.

92. The English System Free.—It will be seen that the Saxons established in England a free system of government. It was carried on partly by the freemen themselves, and partly by their representatives. The King was not regarded as ruling by Divine right, but as the delegate of the nation. It combined therefore both democratic and republican elements. Time wrought its changes; the monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements varied in strength at different times; but the great features of the Saxon constitution were never lost, and the government progressively became the freest in the world.

93. Likeness of the Colonies to England.-This recital of facts shows how like the thirteen Colonies were to the parent state. With variations of detail, they all reproduced the political institutions of England; and, save that they were not sovereign states, they were Englands in miniature. The Town, County, and Mixed systems of local government were an outgrowth, under new conditions, of the local institutions of England. Their Legislative, Executive, and Judicial departments were copies of the Parliament, King, and Courts of England. The houses of representatives and the councils were the House of Commons and the House of Lords over again. In fact, in some of the Colonies the lower house was called the House of Commons. The people in England voted for members of the House of Commons only; and in the Colonies, with the exception of the two republican Colonies of Connecticut and Rhode Island, they voted only for members of the popular branch of the Legislature. An appointed Council had taken the place of the hereditary House of Lords, and an appointed Governor the place of the hereditary King. More men relatively exercised the right of suffrage in the Colonies than in England, but their suffrage did not directly affect, with the exceptions named, more departments of the government. Hence, the common statement that the Colonists came to America with new political ideas cannot be true of governmental forms and processes. In this respect they brought nothing new and established nothing new.

They wished to give the people more weight in conducting the government according to the old forms, and this they accomplished. Besides, they were more interested in enlarging their civil and religious rights than their political rights.

94. New Modes of Government Rejected.-At first some new modes of government, or at least modes unknown to the English people, were attempted. In Virginia the first local government was a despotism centered in the Council, limited only by the Company and the King in England. Plymouth and Massachusetts both tried democracy for a few years. Moreover government by commercial companies such as the charters of 1606 and 1620 contemplate, or by a benevolent association, as in Georgia, was foreign to the English mind and habit. The thoroughness with which these devices were swept away, and the uniformity and promptness with which forms and modes of government familiar to the people were established, show the strength of political habit. Perhaps, too, proprietary government would have gone with the others, only it was simple and easily understood, the proprietary being merely a lieutenant-king.

95. The Dual System. Circumstances, however, made one important departure from English precedent necessary. This was dual government, the double jurisdiction of the Crown and the Colony. If the planters had not insisted upon being admitted to participation in public affairs, they would not have been Englishmen. If the King had not insisted upon extending his authority over the Plantations, he would have had no colonies. Mr. Bryce says the American of to-day has "two loyalties and two patriotisms." His Colonial ancestors had them also. At Jamestown and Boston are found the roots of our federal system.

96. The Governments Growths.-These well defined governments, although they conformed so closely to the English model, were not set up at given places or times. Like all really useful political institutions, they were progressively developed. Not one of the charters fully describes the government existing in the Colony organized under it. The Declaration of Independence charged the King with conspiring with others to subject the Colonies to a jurisdiction foreign to their constitution. This language relates to the Colonies collectively, as one. But the Colonies as one had no constitution in the sense that the United States have one to-day. They did, however, have a constitution in a wider and less definite sense. The forms of government transplanted from England; the rights and usages belonging to all Englishmen and expressly guaranteed to the Colonies, these, modified by American conditions, made up the constitution that the King sought to overthrow.

97. English Colonies Compared With New Spain and New France.-Nothing could more clearly show the remarkable political