irection either might enjoy, neither was regarded as
independent. All legal authority was vested in the company and
exercised by the officers and freemen assembled in general court. Yet of
the two thousand settlers who came over in 1630, less than a score were
members of the company. Authority so narrowly confined could not long
remain unquestioned in a primitive community. In October, 1630, one
hundred and nine persons petitioned to be admitted to the freedom of the
corporation. It was a critical moment in the history of this "due form
of Government." Without numbers, the colony could not thrive; without
restriction of authority, it would be in danger of falling away from the
ideals of its founders. The circumstance was one of many to reveal the
essential difference, in respect to primary motive, between leaders and
followers. The mass of the settlers had migrated primarily to secure
economic enfranchisement: too great restraint would drive them to the
north, where colonists were desired by Mason and Gorges, or to Plymouth,
where the tolerant Pilgrims would welcome them perhaps on easier terms.
But Winthrop and his associates had migrated primarily to establish a
community that should live by God's law; and to admit all freeholders to
share in its direction would end in the defeat of that high purpose.

Weight of numbers prevailed at last; and the history of Massachusetts
Bay in the seventeenth century is the story of the vain and pathetic
effort of single-minded men to identify the temporal and the spiritual
commonwealths. The compromise presently made was the first step in the
final surrender. The one hundred and nine petitioners were admitted; but
it was shortly voted, in plain violation of the charter, that the
rights of the freemen should be confined to the election of the
assistants; and, "to the end that the body of the commons may be
preserved of honest and good men, it was likewise ordered that for time
to come no man shall be admitted to the freedom of this body polliticke
but such as are members of some of the churches within the lymitts of
the same." In order to preserve the purity of the state still more
effectively, it was voted, in 1636, that even church members should be
excluded unless the churches to which they belonged had secured the
approbation both of the magistrates and of a majority of the churches
already established.

The suffrage remained thus restricted until 1684, although a nominal
modifi