later Connecticut ratified by a vote of 128 to 40, after a session of
only five days. The hopes of the Antifederalists now rested upon
Massachusetts, where the state convention assembled on the 9th of
January, the same day on which that of Connecticut broke up. Should
Massachusetts refuse to ratify, there would be no hope for the
Constitution. Even should nine states adopt it without her, no one
supposed a Federal Union feasible from which so great a state should be
excluded. Her action, too, would have a marked effect upon other states.
It could not be denied that the outlook in Massachusetts was far from
encouraging. The embers of the Shays rebellion still smouldered there,
and in the mountain counties of Worcester and Berkshire were heard loud
murmurs of discontent. Laws impairing the obligation of contracts were
just what these hard-pressed farmers desired, and by the proposed
Constitution all such laws were forever prohibited. The people of the
district of Maine, which had formed part of Massachusetts for nearly a
century, were anxious to set up an independent government for
themselves; and they feared that if they were to enter into the new and
closer Federal Union as part of that state, they might hereafter find it
impossible to detach themselves. For this reason half of the Maine
delegates were opposed to the Constitution. In none of the thirteen
states, moreover, was there a more intense devotion to state rights than
in Massachusetts. Nowhere had local self-government reached a higher
degree of efficiency; nowhere had the town meeting flourished with such
vigour. It was especially characteristic of men trained in the town
meeting to look with suspicion upon all delegated power, upon all
authority that was to be exercised from a distance. They believed it to
be all important that people should manage their own affairs, instead of
having them managed by other people; and so far had this principle been
carried that the towns of Massachusetts were like little
semi-independent republics, and the state was like a league of such
republics, whose representatives, sitting in the state legislature, were
like delegates strictly bound by instructions rather than untrammelled
members of a deliberative body. To men trained in such a school, it
would naturally seem that the new Constitution delegated altogether too
much power to a governing body which must necessarily be remote from
most of its constituents. It was feared tha