he elective
system, approved the union of equity and law courts, prohibited the
election of a member of the Legislature to the United States Senate,
and submitted to the decision of the people the right of coloured men
to equal suffrage. Only in the retention of the county court were
O'Conor's views sustained; and this came largely through the influence
of Arphaxed Loomis, the material part of whose amendment was
ultimately adopted. When, finally, the Constitution in its entirety
was submitted to the convention for its approval, O'Conor was one of
six to vote against it.

The Constitution of 1846 was the people's Constitution. It reserved to
them the right to act more frequently upon a large class of questions,
introducing the referendum which characterises popular government,
and making it a more perfect expression of the popular will. That the
people appreciated the greater power reserved to them was shown on the
third of November, by a vote of 221,528 to 92,436. With few
modifications, the Constitution of 1846 still remains in force,--ample
proof that wisdom, unalloyed with partisan politics or blind
conservatism, guided the convention which framed it.

CHAPTER X

DEFEAT AND DEATH OF SILAS WRIGHT

1846-1847

The Democratic campaign for governor in 1846 opened with extraordinary
interest. Before the Legislature adjourned, on May 13, the Hunkers
refused to attend a party caucus for the preparation of the usual
address. Subsequently, however, they issued one of their own, charging
the Radicals with hostility to the Polk administration and with
selfishness, born of a desire to control every office within the gift
of the canal board. The address did not, in terms, name Silas Wright,
but the Governor was not blind to its attacks. "They are not very
different from what I expected when I consented to take this office,"
he wrote a friend in Canton. "I do not yet think it positively certain
that we shall lose the convention, but that its action and the
election are to produce a perfect separation of a portion of our party
from the main body I cannot any longer entertain a single doubt. You
must not permit appearances to deceive you. Although I am not
denounced here by name with others, the disposition to do that, if
policy would permit, is not even disguised, and every man known to be
strongly my friend and firmly in my confidence is more bitterly
denounced than any other."[358]

[Footnote 358: Jabez D. Hammon