y, as children speak of a
father's roof, with that venerated structure, the British Constitution.
How complex is the architecture of the latter! here exhibiting the
clumsy work of the Saxon, there the more graceful touch of later
conquerors; the whole colossal pile, magnificent with turrets and
towers, and decorated with armorial devices and inscriptions, written in
a language not only dead, but never native to the island; all eloquent,
indeed, with the spirit of ages past, yet haunted with the cry of
suffering humanity and the clanking of chains that come up from its
subterranean dungeons.

Mark, too, the rifts and seams in its gray walls--traces of convulsion
and revolution. Proud as it is, its very splendor shows the marks of a
barbarous age. Its tapestry speaks a language dissonant to the ears of
freemen. It tells of exclusive privileges, of divine rights, not in the
people, but in the king, of primogeniture, of conformities, of
prescriptions, of serfs and lords, of attainder that dries up like a
leprosy the fountains of inheritable blood; and, lastly, it discourses
of the rights of British subjects, in eloquent language, but sometimes
with qualifications that startle the ears of men who have tasted the
sweets of a more enlarged liberty. Such was the spirit of the British
Constitution, and code of the seventeenth century. I do not blame it
that it was not better; perhaps it could not then have been improved
without risk. Improvement in an old state is the work of time. But I
have a right to speak with pride of the more advanced freedom of our
own.

The Constitution of Connecticut sets out with the practical recognition
of the doctrine that all ultimate power is lodged with the people. The
body of the people is the body politic. From the people flow the
fountains of law and justice. The governor and the other magistrates,
the deputies themselves, are but a kind of committee, with delegated
powers to act for the free planters. Elected from their number, they
must spend their short official term in the discharge of the trust, and
then descend to their old level of citizen voters. Here are to be no
interminable parliaments. The majority of the general court can adjourn
it at will. Nor is there to be an indefinite prorogation of the
Legislature at the will of a single man. Let the governor and the
magistrates look to it. If they do not call a general court, the
planters will take the matter into their own hands and mee