beginning of Connecticut as separate and apart from Massachusetts.

On May 31, 1638, Hooker preached a sermon of great eloquence and power, that age has not dimmed nor time robbed of its remarkable conception of the philosophy of democracy; which foreshadowed by 138 years the great basic truths of the Declaration of Independence. "The foundation of authority," Hooker declared, "is laid in the free consent of the people." "Governments are instituted among men deriving their powers from the consent of the governed,” the authors of the Declaration of Independence wrote. "The choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people, by God's own allowance,” Hooker said, and "they who have power to appoint officers and magistrates, it is in their power, also, to set the bounds and limitations of the power and place unto which they call them." The Declaration of Independence indicted the king for having "obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers. He has made Judges depend upon his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries."

In the following January a written constitution was adopted, which too many American writers have treated as an incident instead of recognizing that it was an epochal event momentous in the progress of mankind. It was the first civil code reduced to writing adopted on American soil; it

was the only written constitution then in existence that organized a form of civil government. Magna Charta was a compact between sovereign and people guaranteeing them certain liberties, but the constitution adopted in that little frame house on the banks of the Connecticut went much further than the compact that the barons wrested from John at Runnymede. Just as Hooker's sermon foreshadowed the Declaration of Independence, so his charter, for he was undoubtedly the moving spirit in its formation and phraseology, was the prototype of the Constitution of the United States.

The Connecticut constitution created, by the federation of the independent towns, an independent republic that contained no reference to any existing sovereign and recognized no government except that which these wanderers from Massachusetts had made for themselves. In that again it served as the model on which in the following century the American constitution was founded, which recognizes neither temporal nor spiritual ruler and acknowledges only the sovereign rule of the people. "It is on the banks of the Connecticut, under the mighty preaching of Thomas Hooker and in the Constitution to which he gave life, if not form, that we draw the first breath of that atmosphere which is now so familiar to us. The birthplace of American democracy is Hartford." 1

Just as the American Constitution puts in the

1 Johnston: Connecticut, p. 73.

hands of Congress certain enumerated powers and reserves to the states and the people those powers on which silence is maintained, so the Constitution of Connecticut reserved to the towns all power and authority save that vested in the General Court. The President of the American Republic is elected by a majority vote, and the power of the people is lodged in the hands of its representatives on a basis of equality. The Governor of Connecticut, who was to the little republic what the President is to the larger federation, and his council were elected by the people at large, the suffrage being almost universal, but each town had an equality of representation in the Assembly. While Connecticut exercised no such influence on the American people as Massachusetts and Virginia, to it belongs the credit of having brought about at the formation of the Constitution of the United States, the compromise by which the states were given equal representation in the Senate and the composition of the House of Representatives was accepted.

Why the Connecticut Englishmen should have developed an individuality marked and characteristic enough to differentiate them from the Englishmen of Massachusetts and those of the other New England colonies it is not easy to determine, but that distinction was early apparent and has survived. The popular name of Americans among Europeans is "Yankees,” and the term is synonymous in the European mind with sharp trading,

acquisitiveness, and abnormal curiosity about the
affairs of one's neighbors,' but among Americans it
is only the New Englanders who are regarded as
the real Yankees, and their distinguishing qualities
are supposed to be typical of the people of Con-
necticut. As a matter of fact, as every American
knows, the Massachusetts man rather resents the
appellation of Yankee.

The little federal republic of Connecticut was
allowed to develop peacefully and normally; its con-
stitution was not violently wrenched out of shape
like that of Massachusetts at the end of the seven-
teenth century. It silently grew until it became the
strongest political structure on the continent.2

Side by side with the federal republic of Hartford there grew up another federation under the name of New Haven, which was founded in 1638. As Hooker was the leading spirit at Hartford so

1 "Rural Yankees, impudent, inquisitive, grasping, sharp, drawling in speech and utterly without manners, a class which has most fortunately passed away, but which once furnished the stock material for Charles Dickens and other English writers who ridiculed Americans. Occasionally, in remote parts of New England, you may find survivors of this class, and if one fastens himself on you, as they are apt to do, you will never forget him." - Sydney George Fisher: Men, Women, and Manners in Colonial Times, vol. ii, p. 140.

"Obadiah or Zephaniah, from Hampshire or Connecticut, who came in without knocking; sat down without invitation; and lighted their pipe without ceremony; then talked of buying land; and, finally, began a discourse on politics, which would have done honor to Praise God Barebones, or any of the members of his parliament.”—Mrs. Grant, Memoirs of an American Lady, p. 286.

An equally uncomplimentary picture of these inquisitive Yankees may be seen in Washington Irving's Knickerbocker.

Fiske: The Beginnings of New England, p. 128.

another clergyman, John Davenport, was foremost in the affairs of the younger colony. Davenport had none of Hooker's liberality and tolerance; he was typical of the intense Puritanism of his time, and New Haven was intended to be even more extreme in its theocratic government than Massachusetts. According to Davenport, man found in the Bible a perfect and sufficient rule for the conduct of civil affairs, and membership in the church was a prerequisite of citizenship; it was Massachusetts over again. Just as Hartford had been formed by the federation of the towns, so the New Haven colony came into existence by a union of New Haven, Milford, Guilford, and Stamford. New Haven, similar to Hartford, set up its own establishment without regard to the sovereignty of England or the rights or claims of any other body of Englishmen. The founders of New Haven assumed as an inherent right the right to be independent and, as its corollary, to do as they saw fit. They had not even a shadowy claim to the title of the land which they occupied. They simply planted themselves there and were content to let the future take care of itself.

Connecticut, when these two little republics came into existence, reproduced what had happened in Massacusetts a few years before. The sweetness and mildness of the Plymouth Pilgrims found their counterpart in Hooker and the Hartford colony; the grim intolerance and blind obedience to Biblical law and the passionate zeal to regulate all conduct