The oath imposed on the magistrates bound them "to admin. ister justice according to the laws here established, and for want thereof according to the word of God." The amendment of the fundamental orders rested with the freemen in general court assembled. All power proceeded from the people. From the beginning, Connecticut was a republic, and was in fact independent.

More than two centuries have elapsed; but the people of Connecticut have found no reason to deviate essentially from the frame of government established by their fathers. Equal laws were the basis of their commonwealth; and therefore its foundations were lasting. These unpretending emigrants invented an admirable system; for they were near to Nature, listened willingly to her voice, and easily copied her forms. No ancient usages, no hereditary differences of rank, no established interests, impeded the application of the principles of justice. Freedom springs spontaneously into life; the artificial distinctions of society require centuries to ripen. History has ever celebrated the heroes who have won laurels in scenes of carnage. Has it no place for the wise legislators, who struck the rock in the wilderness, so that the waters of liberty gushed forth in copious and perennial streams? They who judge of men by their services to the human race will never cease to honor the memory of Hooker, and will join with it that of Ludlow, and still more that of Haynes.

In equal independence, a Puritan colony sprang up at New Haven, under the guidance of John Davenport as its pastor, and of his friend, the excellent Theophilus Eaton. Its forms were austere, unmixed Calvinism; but the spirit of humanity sheltered itself under the rough exterior. In April, 1638, the colonists held their first gathering under a branching oak. Beneath the leafless tree the little flock was taught by Davenport that, like the Son of man, they were led into the wilderness to be tempted. After a day of fasting and prayer, they rested their first frame of government on a simple plantation covenant, that "all of them would be ordered by the rules which the scriptures held forth to them." A title to lands was obtained by a treaty with the natives, whom they protected against the Mohawks. When, after more than a year,

the free planters of the colony desired a more perfect form of government, the followers of Him who was laid in a manger held their constituent assembly in a barn. There, by the influence of Davenport, it was resolved that the scriptures are the perfect rule of a commonwealth; that the purity and peace of the ordinances to themselves and their posterity were the great end of civil order; and that church members only should be free burgesses. A committee of twelve was selected to choose seven men, qualified for the foundation-work of organizing the government. Eaton, Davenport, and five others, were "the seven pillars" for the new House of Wisdom in the wilderness.

In August 1639, the seven met together. Abrogating every previous executive trust, they admitted to the court all church members; the character of civil magistrates was next expounded "from the sacred oracles;" and the election followed. Then Davenport, in the words of Moses to Israel in the wilderness, gave a charge to the governor to judge righteously; "the cause that is too hard for you," such was part of the minister's text, "bring it unto me, and I will hear it." Annual elections were ordered; and God's word established as the only rule in public affairs. Eaton, one of the most opulent of the comers to New England, was annually elected governor for near twenty years, till his death. All agree that he conducted public affairs with unfailing discretion and equity; in private life, he joined the stoicism of the Puritan to innate benevolence and mildness.

New Haven made the Bible its statute-book, and the elect its freemen. As neighboring towns were planted, each constituted itself a house of wisdom, resting on its seven pillars, and aspiring to be illumined by the eternal light. The colonists prepared for the second coming of Christ, which they confidently expected. Meantime, their pleasant villages spread along the Sound and on the opposite shore of Long Island, and for years they nursed the hope of "speedily planting Delaware."

CHAPTER XVII.

THE PRELATES AND MASSACHUSETTS.

THE prohibition of the Book of Common Prayer at Salem produced an early harvest of implacable enemies to the colony. Resentment rankled in the minds of some, whom Endecott had perhaps too passionately punished; and Mason and Gorges persistently kept alive their vindictive complaints. A petition even reached King Charles, complaining of distraction and disorder in the plantations; but Massachusetts was ably defended by Saltonstall, Humphrey, and Cradock, its friends in England; and, in January, 1633, the committee of the privy council ordered the adventurers to continue their undertakings cheerfully, for the king did not design to impose on the people of Massachusetts the ceremonies which they had emigrated to avoid. The country, it was believed, would in time be very beneficial to England.

After the charter had been carried over to America, the progress of these earliest settlements was watched in the mother country with the most glowing interest. A letter from New England was venerated" as a sacred script or as a writing of some holy prophet, and was carried many miles, where divers came to hear it." Voices from the churches of Massachusetts prevailed with their persecuted friends in Old England till "the departure of so many of the BEST, such numbers of faithful and free-born Englishmen and good Christians," seemed to the serious minded " an ill-boding sign to the nation," and began to effray the Episcopal party. In February, 1634, ships bound with passengers for New England were detained in the Thames by an order of the council.

But the change reached farther. The archbishops could

complain that not only was the religious system which was forbidden by the laws of the realm established in the new colony in America, but the service established by law in England was prohibited. Proof was produced of marriages celebrated by civil magistrates, and of an established system of church discipline which was at variance with the laws of England. The superintendence of the colonies was, therefore, in April, 1634, removed from the privy council to an arbitrary special commission, of which William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury, and the archbishop of York, were the chief. These, with ten of the highest officers of state, were invested with full power to make laws and orders for the government of English colonies planted in foreign parts, to appoint judges and magistrates and establish courts for civil and ecclesiastical affairs, to regulate the church, to impose penalties and imprisonment for offences in ecclesiastical matters, to remove governors and require an account of their government, to determine all appeals from the colonies, and to revoke all charters and patents which had been surreptitiously obtained, or which conceded liberties prejudicial to the royal prerogative.

Cradock, who had been governor of the corporation in England before the transfer of the charter of Massachusetts, was strictly charged to deliver it up; and he wrote to the governor and council to send it home. Upon receipt of his letter, they resolved "not to return any answer or excuse at that time." In September, a copy of the commission to Archbishop Laud and his associates was brought to Boston; and it was at the same time rumored that the colonists were to be compelled by force to accept a new governor, the discipline of the church of England, and the laws of the commissioners. The intelligence awakened "the magistrates and deputies to discover their minds each to other, and to hasten their fortifications," toward which, poor as was the colony, six hundred pounds were raised.

In January, 1635, all the ministers assembled at Boston; and they unanimously declared against the reception of a general governor, saying: "We ought to defend our lawful possessions, if we are able; if not, to avoid and protract."

In the month before this declaration, it is not strange that

Laud and his associates should have esteemed the inhabitants of Massachusetts to be men of refractory humors; complaints resounded of parties consenting in nothing but hostility to the church of England; of designs to shake off the royal jurisdiction. Restraints were placed upon emigration; no one above the rank of a serving man might remove to the colony without the special leave of Laud and his associates; and persons of inferior order were required to take the oaths of supremacy and allegiance, of obedience to the church of England, as well as fidelity to its king.

Willingly as these acts were enforced by religious bigotry, they were promoted by another cause. A change had come over the character of the great Plymouth council for the colonization of New England, which had already made grants of all the lands from the Penobscot to Long Island. The members of the company desired as individuals to become the proprietaries of extensive territories, even at the dishonor of invalidating all their grants as a corporation. A meeting of the lords was convened in April, 1635; and the coast, from Acadia to beyond the Hudson, was divided into shares, and distributed among them by lots.

To the possession of their prizes the inflexible colony of Massachusetts formed an obstacle, which they hoped to overcome by surrendering their general patent for New England to the king. To obtain of him a confirmation of their respective grants, they set forth "that the Massachusetts patentees, having surreptitiously obtained from the crown a confirmation of their grant of the soil, had made themselves a free people, and for such hold themselves at present; framing unto themselves new conceits of religion and new forms of ecclesiastical and temporal government, punishing divers that would not approve thereof, under other pretences indeed, yet for no other cause save only to make themselves absolute masters of the country, and uncontrollable in their new laws."

At the Trinity term of the court of king's bench, a quo warranto was brought against the company of the Massachusetts bay. At the ensuing Michaelmas, several of its members who resided in England made their appearance, and judgment was pronounced against them individually; the rest of