essities and
commands of the crown. At first, knights and burgesses were summoned,
often against their will, to a Parliament called by the king. Many
remonstrances were presented against sending up these representatives;
the charge of paying them was, not unfrequently, felt to be burdensome
by the people. But the king wished their counsel and advice, and perhaps
the presence of a popular body, to enable him to make greater headway
against the feudal barons in the aristocratic and hereditary branch of
the legislature. In process of time these knights and burgesses assumed
more and more a popular character, and became, by degrees, the guardians
of popular rights. The people through them obtained protection against
the encroachments of the crown and the aristocracy, till in our day they
are understood to be the representatives of the people, charged with the
protection of their rights. With us it was always just so.
Representation has always been of this character. The power is with the
people; but they cannot exercise it in masses or _per capita_; they can
only exercise it by their representatives. The whole system with us has
been popular from the beginning.

Now, the basis of this representation is suffrage. The right to choose
representatives is every man's part in the exercise of sovereign power;
to have a voice in it, if he has the proper qualifications, is the
portion of political power belonging to every elector. That is the
beginning. That is the mode in which power emanates from its source, and
gets into the hands of conventions, legislatures, courts of law, and the
chair of the executive. It begins in suffrage. Suffrage is the
delegation of the power of an individual to some agent.

This being so, then follow two other great principles of the American
system.

1. The first is, that the right of suffrage shall be guarded, protected,
and secured against force and against fraud; and,

2. The second is, that its exercise shall be prescribed by previous law;
its qualifications shall be prescribed by previous law; the time and
place of its exercise shall be prescribed by previous law; the manner of
its exercise, under whose supervision (always sworn officers of the
law), is to be prescribed. And then, again, the results are to be
certified to the central power by some certain rule, by some known
public officers, in some clear and definite form, to the end that two
things may be done: first, that every man entitled