tion with Connecticut; and the general court sent it to the several towns "for the consideration of all the churches and people." There, in Massachusetts, legislative action on the matter ended. In 1664, the general court of Connecticut, after its absorption of New Haven, recommended the less exclusive system to the churches; but the majority of them adhered stiffly to the ancient rule.

The frugality of private life had its influence on public expenditure. Half a century after the concession of the charter, the annual expenses of the government did not exceed eight hundred pounds. The wages of the chief justice were ten shillings a day while on service. In each county a magistrate acted as judge of probate, and the business was transacted with small expense to the fatherless.

There were common schools from the first. Nor was it long before a college, such as the day of small things permitted, began to be established; and Yale owes its birth "to ten worthy fathers, who, in 1700, assembled at Branford, and each one, laying a few volumes on a table, said: 'I give these books for the founding of a college in this colony.'"

But the political education of the people is due to the happy organization of towns, which here, as throughout all New England, constituted each settlement in its local affairs a selfgoverning democracy. In the ancient republics, citizenship had been an hereditary privilege. In Connecticut, it was acquired by inhabitancy, was lost by removal. Each townmeeting was a legislative body; and all inhabitants, the affluent and the more needy, the reasonable and the foolish, were members with equal franchises. There the taxes of the town were discussed and levied; there its officers were chosen; there roads were laid out and bridges voted; there the minister was elected, the representatives to the assembly were instructed. The debate was open to all; wisdom asked no favors; the churl abated nothing of his pretensions. Whoever reads the records of these village commonwealths will be perpetually coming upon some little document of rare political sagacity. When Connecticut emerged into scenes where a new political world was to be created, the rectitude that had

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ordered the affairs of a neighborhood showed itself in the field and in council.

During the intervening century, we shall rarely have occasion to recur to Connecticut: its institutions were perfected, and, with transient interruptions, were unharmed. To describe its condition is but to enumerate the blessings of self-government, as exercised by a community of thoughtful freeholders, who have neither a nobility nor a populace. How dearly it remembered the parent island is told by the English names of its towns. Could Charles II. have looked back upon earth, and seen what security his gift of a charter had conferred, he might have gloried in an act which redeemed his life from the charge of having been unproductive of public happiness. In a proclamation, Connecticut, under its great seal, told the world that its days under the charter were "halcyon days of peace." Time, as it advances, may unfold scenes of more wealth and of wider action, but not of more contentment and purity.

Rhode Island was fostered by Charles II. with still greater liberality. When Roger Williams had succeeded in obtaining from the Long Parliament the confirmed union of the territories that now constitute the state, he returned to America, leaving John Clarke as the agent of the colony in England. Never did a young commonwealth possess a more faithful friend; and never did a young people cherish a fonder desire for the enfranchisement of mind. "Plead our case," they had said to him in previous instructions, which Gorton and others had drafted, "in such sort as we may not be compelled to exercise any civil power over men's consciences; we do judge it no less than a point of absolute cruelty." And now that the hereditary monarch was restored and duly acknowledged, they had faith that "the gracious hand of Providence would preserve them in their just rights and privileges." "It is much in our hearts," they urged in their petition to Charles II., “to hold forth a lively experiment, that a most flourishing civil state may stand, and best be maintained, with a full liberty of religious concernments." The good-natured monarch listened to their petition; Clarendon exerted himself in their behalf; the making trial of religious freedom in a nook of a remote

continent could not appear dangerous; it might at once build up another rival to Massachusetts and solve a problem in the history of man. The charter, retarded only by controversies about bounds, on the eighth of July, 1663, passed the seals, and, with new principles, embodied all that had been granted to Connecticut. The supreme authority was committed to a governor, deputy governor, ten assistants, and deputies from the towns. The scruples of the inhabitants were so respected that no oath of allegiance was required of them; the laws were to be agreeable to those of England, yet with the kind reference "to the constitution of the place, and the nature of the people;" and the monarch proceeded to exercise, as his brother attempted to do in England, and as by the laws of England he could not do within the realm, the dispensing power in matters of religion: "No person within the said colony, at any time hereafter, shall be any wise molested, punished, disquieted, or called in question, for any difference in opinion in matters of religion; every person may at all times freely and fully enjoy his own judgment and conscience in matters of religious concernments."

No joy could be purer than that of the colonists when, in November, 1663, the news was spread abroad that "George Baxter, the most faythful and happie bringer of the charter," had arrived. On the beautiful island of Rhode Island, the whole people gathered together, "for the solemn reception of his majesty's gracious letters-patent." It was "a very great meeting and assembly." The letters of the agent "were opened, and read with good delivery and attention;" the charter was next taken forth from the precious box that contained it, and "was read by Baxter, in the audience and view of all the people; and the letters with his majesty's royal stamp and the broad seal, with much beseeming gravity were held up on high, and presented to the perfect view of the people."

This charter of government, establishing a political system which few beside the Rhode Islanders themselves then believed to be practicable, remained in existence till it became the oldest constitutional charter in the world. The probable population of Rhode Island, at the time of its reception, may have

been two thousand five hundred. In one hundred and seventy years that number increased forty-fold; and the government, which was hardly thought to contain checks enough on the power of the people to endure even among shepherds and farmers, protected a dense population and the accumulations of a widely extended commerce. Nowhere in the world were life, liberty, and property safer than in Rhode Island.

The thanks of the colony were unanimously voted to a triumvirate of benefactors: to "King Charles of England, for his high and inestimable, yea, incomparable favor;" to Clarendon, who had shown "to the colony exceeding great care and love;" and to the modest and virtuous Clarke, the persevering and disinterested envoy, who, during a twelve years' mission, had sustained himself by his own exertions and a mortgage on his estate; whose whole life was a continued exercise of benevolence, and who, at his death, bequeathed all his possessions for the relief of the needy and the education of the young. Others have sought office to advance their fortunes; he, like Roger Williams, parted with his little means for the public good. He had unsparing enemies in Massachusetts, and left a name on which no one cast a shade.

In May, 1664, the assembly of the people of Rhode Island, at their regular session, established religious freedom in the very words of the charter: "No person shall at any time hereafter be any ways called in question for any dif erence of opinion in matters of religion." In May, 1665, the legislature asserted that "liberty to all persons, as to the worship of God, had been a principle maintained in the colony from the very beginning thereof; and it was much in their hearts to preserve the same liberty for ever." The commissioners from England, who visited Rhode Island, reported of its people: "They allow liberty of conscience to all who live civilly; they admit of all religions." And again, in 1680, the government of the colony could say, what there was no one oppressed individual to controvert: We leave every man to walk as God persuades his heart; all our people enjoy freedom of conscience." To Jews who had inquired if they could find a home in Rhode Island, the assembly of 1684 made answer: We declare that they may expect as good pro

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tection here as any stranger, not being of our nation, residing among us ought to have;" and in August, 1694, the Jews, who from the time of their expulsion from Spain had had no safe resting-place, entered the harbor of Newport to find equal protection, and in a few years to build a house of God for a Jewish congregation. Freedom of conscience "to every man, whether Jew, or Turk, or papist, or whomsoever that steers no otherwise than his conscience dares," was, from the first, the trophy of Rhode Island.

In 1665, it divided its general assembly into two houses— a change which, near the close of the century, was permanently adopted. It was importuned by Plymouth and vexed by Connecticut on the subject of boundaries.

The royal commissioners, in 1665, required of all the oath of allegiance; the general assembly, scrupulous in its respect for the rights of conscience, would listen to no proposition except for an engagement of fidelity and due obedience to the laws as a condition of exercising the elective franchise. This engagement being found irksome to the Quakers, it was the next year repealed.

Virginia possessed far stronger claims to favor than Rhode Island and Connecticut; and, in April, 1661, Sir William Berkeley embarked for England as her agent. We shall see how vainly she asked relief from the navigation act, or a guarantee for her constitution. Her agent, joining with seven others, obtained, in 1663, the grant of Carolina, which narrowed her limits on her whole southern frontier. King Charles was caricatured in Holland with a woman on each arm and courtiers picking his pocket; this time they took provinces, which, if divided among the eight, would have given to each a tract as extensive as the kingdom of France. To gratify favorites, Virginia, in 1669, was dismembered by lavish grants; and, in 1673, all that remained of it was given away for a generation, as recklessly as a man might part with a life-estate in a barren field.

To complete the picture of the territorial changes made by Charles II., it must be added that, in 1664, he not only enfeoffed his brother, the duke of York, with the country between Pemaquid and the St. Croix, but-in defiance of his own