t in a body to
take care of their neglected interests.

One of the most striking features in this new and at the same time
strange document is that it will tolerate no rotten-borough system.
Every deputy who goes to the Legislature is to go from his own town, and
is to be a free planter of that town. In this way he will know what is
the will of his constituents and what their wants are.

This paper has another remarkable trait. There is to be no taxation
without representation in Connecticut. The towns, too, are recognized as
independent municipalities. They are the primary centres of power older
than the constitution--the makers and builders of the State. They have
given up to the State a part of their corporate powers, as they received
them from the free planters, that they may have a safer guarantee for
the keeping of the rest. Whatever they have not given up they hold in
absolute right.

How strange, too, that in defining so carefully and astutely the limits
of the government, these constitution-makers should have forgotten the
King. One would but suppose that those who indited this paper were even
aware of the existence of titled majesty beyond what belonged to the
King of kings. They mention no supreme power save that of the
commonwealth, which speaks and acts through the general court.

Such was the Constitution of Connecticut. I have said it was the oldest
of the American constitutions. More than this, I might say, it is the
mother of them all. It has been modified in different States to suit the
circumstances of the people and the size of their respective
territories; but the representative system peculiar to the American
republics was first unfolded by Ludlow--who probably drafted the
Constitution of Connecticut--and by Hooker, Haynes, Wolcott, Steele,
Sherman, Stone, and the other far-sighted men of the colony, who must
have advised and counselled to do what they and all the people in the
three towns met together in a mass to sanction and adopt as their own.
Let me not be understood to say that I consider the framers of this
paper perfect legislators or in all respects free from bigotry and
intolerance. How could they throw off in a moment the shackles of custom
and old opinion? They saw more than two centuries beyond their own era.
England herself at this day has only approximated, without reaching, the
elevated table-land of constitutional freedom, whose pure air was
breathed by the earliest planters of