ar as government had now passed
into the hands of the people there was no longer any reason to fear that
it would encroach upon what they regarded as their rights. With the
transition, then, from class to popular sovereignty there was a
corresponding change in the attitude of the people toward the
government. They naturally desired to limit the authority and restrict
the activity of the government as long as they felt that it was
irresponsible; but as soon as they acquired an active control over it,
the reason which formerly actuated them in desiring to limit its powers
was no longer operative. Their ends could now be accomplished and their
interests best furthered by unhampered political activity. They would
now desire to remove the checks upon the government for the same reason
that they formerly sought to impose them--viz., to promote their own
welfare.

This tendency is seen in the changes made in the state constitutions at
the beginning of the American revolution. As shown in a previous
chapter, they established the supremacy of the legislative body and
through this branch of the government, the supremacy of the majority of
the qualified voters. We have here a new conception of liberty. We see a
tendency in these constitutional changes to reject the old passive view
of state interference as limited by the consent of the governed and take
the view that real liberty implies much more than the mere power of
constitutional resistance--that it is something positive, that its
essence is the power to actively control and direct the policy of the
state. The early state constitutions thus represent a long step in the
direction of unlimited responsible government.

This, as we have seen, was the chief danger which the conservative
classes saw in the form of government established at the outbreak of the
Revolution. They were afraid that the power of the numerical majority
would be employed to further the interests of the many at the expense of
the few, and to guard against such a use of the government they sought
to re-establish the system of checks. The Constitution which restored
the old scheme of government in a new garb also revived the old
conception of individual liberty. There is, however, one important
difference between the eighteenth-century conception of liberty and that
which finds expression in our constitutional literature. Formerly it was
because of the lack of popular control that the people generally
desire