nal strips or zones have, with more or less modification, extended westward. The men of New England, with their Portland and Salem reproduced more than 3000 miles distant in the state of Oregon, and within 100 miles of the Pacific Ocean, may be said in a certain sense to have realized literally the substance of King James's grant to the Plymouth Company. It will be noticed that the kinds of local government described in our earlier chapters are characteristic respectively of the three original zones: the township system being exemplified chiefly in the northern zone, the county system in the southern zone, and the mixed townshipcounty system in the central zone.

The London and Plymouth companies did not perish until after state governments had been organized in the colonies already founded upon their territories. In 1619 the colonists of Virginia, with the aid of the more liberal spirits in the London Company, se- House of cured for themselves a representative Burgesses government. To the governor and in Virginia his council, appointed in England, there was added a general assembly composed of two burgesses from each "plantation,"1 elected by

1 The word " plantation " is here used, not in its later and ordinary sense, as the estate belonging to an individual planter, but in an earlier sense. In this early usage it was equivalent to "settlement." It was used in New England

the inhabitants. This assembly, the first legislative body that ever sat in America, met on the 30th of July, 1619, in the choir of the rude church at Jamestown. The dignity of the burgesses was preserved, as in the House of Commons, by sitting with their hats on; and after offering prayer, and taking the oath of allegiance and supremacy, they proceeded to enact a number of laws relating to public worship, to agriculture, and to intercourse with the Indians. Curiously enough, so confident was the belief of the settlers that they were founding towns, that they called their representatives “burgesses," and down to 1776 the assembly continued to be known as the House of "Burgesses," although towns refused to grow in Virginia, and soon after counties were organized in 1634 the burgesses sat for counties. Such were the beginnings of representative government in Virginia.

The government of Massachusetts is descended from the Dorchester Company formed in England in 1623, for the ostensible purpose of trading in furs and timber and catching fish on the shores of Massachusetts Bay. After a disastrous beginning this company was dissolved, but only to be immediately reorganized on a greater scale. In 1628 a grant of the land as well as in Virginia; thus Salem was spoken of by the court of assistants in 1629 as "New England's Plantation.”

between the Charles and Merrimack rivers was obtained from the Plymouth Company; and in 1629 a charter was obtained from Company of Charles I. So many men from the Massachueast of England had joined in the setts Bay enterprise that it could no longer be fitly called a Dorchester Company. The new name was significantly taken from the New World. The charter created a corporation under the style of the Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay in New England. The freemen of the Company were to hold a meeting four times a year; and they were empowered to choose a governor, a deputy governor, and a council of eighteen assistants, who were to hold their meetings each month. They could administer oaths of supremacy and allegiance, raise troops for the defence of their possessions, admit new associates into the Company, and make regulations for the management of their business, with the vague and weak proviso that in order to be valid their enactment must in no wise contravene the laws of England. Nothing was said as to the place where the Company should hold its meetings, and accordingly after a few months the Company transferred itself and its charter to New England, in order that it might carry out its intentions with as little interference as possible on the part of the Crown.

Whether this transfer of the charter was legally justifiable or not is a question which has been much debated, but with which we need not here vex ourselves. The lawyers of the Company were shrewd enough to know that a loosely drawn instrument may be made to admit of great liberty of action. Under the guise of a mere trading corporation the Puritan leaders deliberately intended to found a civil commonwealth in accordance with their own theories of government.

Government

setts; the General Court

After their arrival in Massachusetts, their numbers increased so rapidly that it became impossible to have a primary assembly of all the freemen, and so a representative assembly was devised after the model of the Old English county court. The representatives sat for townships, and were called deputies. At first they sat in the same chamber with the of Massachu- assistants, but in 1644 the legislative body was divided into two chambers, the deputies forming the lower house, while the upper was composed of the assistants, who were sometimes called magistrates. In elections the candidates for the upper house were put in nomination by the General Court and voted on by the freemen. In general the assistants represented the common or central power of the colony, while the deputies represented the interests of popular self-government.

The former was comparatively an aristocratic and the latter a democratic body, and there were frequent disputes between the two.

It is worthy of note that the governing body thus constituted was at once a legislative and a judicial body, like the English county court which served as its model. Inferior courts were organized at an early date in Massachusetts, but the highest judicial tribunal was the legislature, which was known as the General Court. It still bears this name to-day, though it long ago ceased to exercise judicial functions.

Now as the freemen of Massachusetts directly chose their governor and deputy-governor, as well as their chamber of deputies, and also took part in choosing their council of assistants, their government was virtually that of an independent republic. The Crown could interpose no effective check upon its proceedings except by threatening to annul its charter and send over a viceroy who might be backed up, if need be, by military force. Such threats were sometimes openly made, but oftener hinted at. They served to make the Massachusetts government somewhat wary and circumspect, but they did not prevent it from pursuing a very independent policy in many respects, as when, for example, it persisted in allowing none but members of the Congregational church to vote. This measure, by which it was intended to