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York and Mary land, and Connecticut, North Caro­lina, and South, Carolina were put on a level with five each. When the first census was taken it was found that the population of the State was 237,946, making its rank eighth among the States. The second census, in 1800, gave it the same relative rank with a population of 251,002.

Almost all the interests of this population were agricultural. The commonwealth was not that scene of busy activity which it is to-day, with streams of raw material pouring into it from every side, springs of manufactured product bubbling up in every acre, and outflowing in freight bound to every part of the world. In 1790, the activity was altogether local. The whole commonwealth was dotted with towns ; bat these were the little centres of small agricultural circles, with very little surplus for exportation beyond that which was necessary for the support of their own people. The green in the heart of the town had its church, and leading to it was a street, with wooden houses, usually comfortable, but often unpainted, and sel­dom representing any great amount of luxury. Each local circle was able to raise most of what was needed for its people; exchanges among the people made up special deficiencies; and the peri­patetic tailor, shoemaker, or other workmen com­pleted whatever was lacking in the simple life of a simple people. Pay was still usually in kind, so that each little circle was able to keep its own

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affairs in motion without much reference to its neighbors. When any unusual surplus was to be exported, it was put into some shape, such as cattle, which could be most easily transported. Mules for the Southern or West Indian market were a common form ; and a drove of mules on its journey was very likely to be a Connecticut pro­duct. The story is told of John Randolph, that, seeing a drove of mules passing through Washing­ton, he pointed it out to Tracy, one of the Con­necticut senators, and said, in ids genial way, " Tracy, there go a lot of your constituents." " Ye-es," said Tracy, " going down to Virginia to teach school."

If the occupations of the people were agricul­tural, their institutions went far to insure them against any of that tendency toward stagnation which had long been associated with the common notion of purely agricultural peoples. The Con­necticut citizen of the early years of this century was a busy man, in some respects, for the common­wealth or the town was continually calling on him to take part in political life. Let us try to follow out the political relations of the citizen before the adoption of the constitution of 1818. Most of his public concerns were with the town. He had gained a legal residence there by being born in it, by being received by a vote of some town meeting, by the approval of the selectmen, the town's ex­ecutive committee, or by being chosen to some

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office by the town. Unless having thus acquired residence, he was in the town only on sufferance. If there had been any reason to apprehend that he would become a charge on the town, it would have been the duty of the selectmen to send him to his own town if he had one in the State, to send him out of the State if he belonged to another State, or to hold his entertainer responsible for him. Sup­posing him to have acquired residence, he had be­come a voter, on arriving at the age of twenty-one, by reason of having a freehold estate of an annual value of $7, or a personal estate on the tax list of $134, by being approved by the selectmen as a person of good moral character, and by taking the freeman's oath. Twice a year, as a voter, he attended the town elections for representatives in the general assembly, at which also the new voters formally took the freeman's oath. At the September meeting, he, with all the other freemen of the State, voted for twenty nam.es, as candidates for the council or upper house of the assembly, at the election to follow in April, The total number of votes cast for all persons was transmitted by the town officers to the assembly; that body counted them and published the twenty names which stood highest on the whole vote of the State ; and at the election in April, when the freemen came to vote for representatives again, he voted for twelve of the published list to be of the council, for the following year. , In May, the general as-

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sembly counted the April vote from all the towns, and announced the names of the fortunate twelve who stood highest and were elected, After cast-ing his votes for the council, the freeman voted for governor, lieutenant-governor, secretary, and treas­urer ; and the votes were sent in like manner to Hartford, to be counted in May under direction of the assembly. Members of congress were chosen in the same way as councilors. The free-men voted for eighteen names in April; the assem­bly counted the votes in May, and declared the eighteen names which stood highest; the freemen voted for seven of these eighteen in September; and the assembly declared the seven elect in the following month. Such were the limitations which the popular vote had Imposed upon itself under the charter.

The occasion of counting the votes was still known by its primitive name of the general elec­tion, though it had long ceased to be anything more than a canvass of votes already cast, and now returned to the general assembly as a canvass­ing body. Until about 1836 it was an occasion of solemn import and unusual magnificence. The governor, if he was not a Hartford man, was met on the outskirts of the capital, the day before that of the great ceremonial, by a company of cavalry, and escorted to his lodgings. When he was noti­fied, on the next morning, that the representa­tives had organized and chosen their speaker, he

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and they, with the council, the sheriffs of the whole commonwealth, with white staves, and the clergy, marched in procession to the first church, escorted by the governor's foot-guards and horse-guards, At the church, the election sermon was delivered by the preacher appointed for that ser-vice. It was no brief or trivial performance. The election sermon of President Stiles, in 1783, made up 120 pages of about 300 words each, though he certainly added matter before publication, At the end of the church services the procession returned to the state house; the votes were counted by a committee of the assembly ; the governor, lieu­tenant-governor, secretary, treasurer, and coun­cil for the year were announced, and the general election was over. An election ball occupied the evening. The theory of the commonwealth still was, until 1818, that our supposititious voter was present and voting for commonwealth officers; but it had long since ceased to be the case. He made one of the spectators occasionally; but, as a rule, he heard of the festivities from others.

The town was the political body which came nearest him. Its annual meeting fell in Decem­ber, when town officers: were chosen ; and a formi­dable list it was and still is. There were select­men not more than seven in number, a town clerk, a town treasurer, constables, surveyors of highways, fence-viewers, listers, collectors, leather-sealers, grand jurors, tithing-men, hay-wards,

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chimney-viewers, gangers, packers, and sealers of weights and measures, besides any other officers whom the peculiar circumstances of the town re­quired. Many of these offices have since fallen from their once high estate, and combinations of voters are sometimes formed with the improper purpose of choosing unseemly persons to fill them; but in their time they were both ancient and honorable. At all events, the multitude of offices and the annual term of office together made the opportunities of public service exceed­ingly numerous, and the prohibition against refus­ing office under penalty of fine in default of good excuse, brought all citizens into the supply of available material for public service. One conse­quence was, that there were few freemen of Con­necticut who passed through life without at some time filling an office on the summons of their fel­lows. The town meeting, properly warned and limited in its action to the subjects specified in the warning, was a political school in which the free­man received his training; the multitude of minor offices provided higher courses for almost all tie freemen ; and from the two together the people received an uncommonly good political education and a sense of personal interest in public affairs.

After all, the main features of the system were the town meeting, the constables, and the select­men. The democratic element was supplied by the town meeting; the element of dictatorship,

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which seems to lurk somewhere in democracy, was in the selectmen ; and the constables repre. sented the commonwealth. The powers of the town meeting were rather more clearly defined than those of the selectmen, probably for the rea­son that the latter could be held to a stricter per, sonal responsibility. The town meeting repre. sented the popular force ; when it adjourned, the selectmen were almost the autocrats of the town until the next town meeting. It is worthy of note that such powers have so seldom been abused or betrayed, and that men, often active business men, could have been found for more than two centuries, as they still are found, to manage with­out fee or reward the complicated, difficult, and sometimes dangerous affairs of a Connecticut town.

The registration of births, marriages, and deaths was with the town clerk ; licenses to marry came from him; and deeds and leases of lands within the township were registered with him. The pro­bate judge was a town officer; and the mass of business of this nature, a county affair outside of the influence of the New England system, was here purely a town matter. Indeed, it may quite safely be said that about all the relations which the citizen holds to the county in other States than those of Mew England, and very many of the relations which he holds to the State itself, he held in Connecticut to the town only. His little

337 town republic hemmed him and his interests in on every side, and it was but seldom that he became conscious that there was a larger and a still larger republic which also claimed Ms allegiance and in­terest.

It must not be supposed that the description of the Connecticut freeman's political position in 1810 is vitally incorrect for his successor of 1887. It has been altered mainly by the increase in the number of cities, - New Haven, Hartford, Bridge­port, Norwich, Waterbury, Middletown, Meriden, New London, and South Norwalk, - with their introduction of stronger municipal powers, and by the erection of " boroughs," or semi-cities, in the more thickly settled portions of the townships. All these steps are detractions from the original powers of the towns, and are a tendency to diminish the citizen's dependence on the township. They have not yet been very serious, though attempts to extend the drift in this direction are often re­newed. The essential thing to be remembered is, that changes in the commonwealth's constitution have affected the status of the towns very little. The original constitution was changed into the charter, and this into the constitution of 1818 ; but these changes were mainly of the common­wealth, and the relative position or the absolute powers of the towns were hardly changed by any of them. To a remarkable degree the relations of the Connecticut citizen to his town are the

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same as those of his forefather when the first towns were planted. More than in any other New England State, the original vigor of the Con­necticut town has enabled it to keep pace with the growing power of the commonwealth.

Hartford and New Haven were cities at the be­ginning of the century, having been incorporated in 1784, but both were very far from our notions of a city. They were little centres of less than 4,000 population, and the communication between them for passengers, mails, and traffic was sup­plied by two stages a week, leaving on Wednes­days and Saturdays. Each had a few weekly newspapers, some shops with a very miscellane­ous stock in trade, and hardly any other evi­dence of city life. Incomes were derived, even in the cities, directly or mediately, from agriculture for the most part, and they were not large : it was rumored, with some natural hesitation, that Pier-pont Edwards, the commonwealth's leading law­yer, enjoyed a revenue of $2,000 per annum from his practice, but this could not be taken as a stand­ard. There were few who were very rich, and few who were very poor ; and the life of the whole commonwealth was a little fuller than, but almost as equable and placid as when there were but three towns in it. Banks and insurance companies came into existence only during the twenty years 1790-1810.

New Haven had an advantage over Hartford in

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its foreign commerce, which had begun to revive before the Revolutionary war, and had received a further impetus from the peace. Its " Long Wharf," 3,500 feet in length, whose greedy maw had swallowed all that private enterprise, lotteries, and common wealth aid could offer it, was not fin­ished until after 1802 ; but it was in active use long before it could be called finished, and it was the headquarters of foreign trade. Its merchants had their own local spirit, and their " wharf law " for the punishment of local offenses; and their ships went all over the world, hardly any of them returning without a contribution of material for the wharf. Thence sailed Isaac Hull, as the captain of a New Haven West Indiaman, long before he thought of meeting the Guerriere. Thither came the Neptune in 1799, with the richest cargo yet imported, its profits being a quarter of a million, and the duties on the cargo being nearly $70,000. And here came out again the old feeling of the " town-born " against the " interlopers," who had come into the town to share in its prosperity. It is said that one of the town-born New Haven cap­tains, being forced to a jetson during a storm at sea, cautioned his men to throw over only the goods of " interlopers." But the influence of the college, with that of foreign commerce and result­ing wealth, did much to raise New Haven above the general level of the commonwealth; and city life in the modern sense had its closest approxi-

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rnation here. The town poor were no longer sold at auction. Geese and cattle were banished from the Green, and that part of the city began to take on some of the beauty which has since made it so notable a spot. The city went a step beyond Its contemporaries in beginning a cemetery on modern lines, abandoning the nakedly ugly New England burying-ground. There was even an earnest but vain effort to obtain a permanent supply of water in 1804.

While Hartford was in most respects more pro­vincial than its rival, having only a small trade in West India rum and molasses, its atmosphere was for some reasons much more literary. Perhaps some of this tendency came from Its more frequent communication with the outside world, through its natural position as a stopping-place on the road from New York to Boston. Since 1772, a stage passed each way once a week. Here were the writers so long known collectively as " the Hart­ford wits," Lemuel Hopkins, Humphreys, Alsop, Trumbull, the author of " McFingal," and Theo­dore Dwight, a younger brother of Dr. Dwight; here they were succeeded by Percival, Brainard, and Mrs. Sigourney, followed by the more recent writers who have maintained Hartford's position in the world of secular literature; and here were always strong ministers, able successors of the leaders of the first migration. Noah Webster was as yet known rather as a grammarian than as a

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lexicographer. Connecticut society, however, was strongly tinged with a curious provincialism in the times about 1800. Things were done and said without special criticism which would nowa­days be thought unpardonable. The pastor of the First Church was Nathan Strong, the writer of the hymn so familiar in our hymn-books, " Swell the anthem, raise the song." In 1790 he and one of the leading members of his flock entered into part­nership for the purpose of managing a distillery. The enterprise was a failure ; and, as imprison­ment for debt was still the law, the junior partner prudently sought refuge outside of the common­wealth's jurisdiction. The ministerial partner, however, stood his ground, remaining within doors on week-days, and appearing on Sundays, when the writ did not run, to minister to his indulgent parishioners. When the financial difficulty had been settled, the pastor's troubles were over. He continued his ministry until his death in 1816, and was made a doctor of divinity by the College of New Jersey in 1801, And the poems of the Hartford wits, largely devoted to political strug­gles, have in them a great deal more of the blud­geon than of the rapier. One must speculate on the mental constitutions of the audience which could cut out a high niche for the author of such poetry as this, which was to be sung to a famil­iar hymn-tune, as the first of a dozen similar stanzas, describing a Democratic meeting : -

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Ye tribes of Faction, join -
Your daughters and your wives ;
Moll Cary 's come to dine,
And dance with Deacon Ives.
Ye ragged throng Of Democrats,
As thick as rats,
Come join the song. Sporadic efforts had been made in the agricul­tural districts of the State to introduce some pro­ducts which should be more profitable than the cereals which were the staple. The silk-culture had been introduced about 1732, and in 1747 Governor Law wore the first coat and stockings made of New England silk. In 1758 the work was taken up by President Stiles of Yale, and by Dr. Aspinwall of Mansfield. The former wrote up the industry, and wore gowns of Connecticut silk at Commencement; the latter put the indus­try at Mansfield and its neighborhood on a foun­dation which has not since been lost. One of its outgrowths has been the silk-works developed by the mechanical and artistic genius of the brothers Cheney, at Manchester, near Hartford, beginning in a modest attempt to make the lower grades of silk, and rising to higher grades through the inven­tion of improved machinery.

Attempts had been made since about 1736 to introduce woolen manufactures as a development of sheep-raising, and these were revived after the Revolution. With help from the general assembly

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a manufactory of woolens was established at Hartford after the peace. Its product was mainly of the pepper-and-salt variety, but it was good and popular; and a suit of the factory's broadcloth was worn by President Washington at the open­ing of Congress in 1790. In 1802 a long step was taken in advance, David Humphreys, of Derby, formerly Washington's aide, now American min­ister to Spain, sent home a flock of one hundred merino sheep. The improved wool soon built up a manufactory at Hurnphreysville, near Derby ; and a suit of broadcloth from it was worn by President Madison at his inauguration in 1809. From this beginning, the industry has grown and flourished in the State; and it had not gone far "before its influence was felt in politics.

The Connecticut delegates in the Convention of 1787 had claimed that theirs was even then a manufacturing State. This was rather a desire than a fact. Since the time of Winthrop, whose attainments in natural science had led him all over the commonwealth in the effort to establish an iron - manufacture, this branch of industry had been carried on with more or less success. One of the first ventures at New Haven had been the establishment of the " iron workes;" and the erection of furnaces was encouraged by the as­sembly and by towns, through remission of taxes and otherwise, all through the eighteenth century. In 1716 the State encouraged the erection of a

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slitting-mill by Fitch & Co. by giving it a legal monopoly of the business for fifteen years. But, after all, the normal condition of Iron produc­tion was that of a household industry. Each fur-nace was meant to furnish enough Iron for a neighborhood ; and the people of the neighbor­hood, using the intervals from agricultural employ­ment in winter or at night, converted the iron into articles for domestic use, with a surplus of such things as nails for exportation. There was not yet enough stimulus in the industry to affect the purely agricultural character of the community seriously, but it was a preparation for the future. The development of the iron district of the northwestern part of Connecticut, about 1730, had been carried to a considerable extent before the Revolution, and it seemed likely to make the commonwealth a mining and manufacturing com­munity. The deposits In. Salisbury and its vicin­ity were abundant, and the supply of wood, then the universal fuel, was plentiful. Encouraged by the Revolution, the production became of great importance. The cannon for the army and navy, the heavy chains which barred the rivers, the ma­terials for gun-barrels and other military equip­ments for the Revolutionary armies, came from the works at Salisbury, which were never reached by the enemy. The workmen considered the Salisbury iron superior to anything else which could be obtained, at home or from abroad, and

345 its reputation seems to have been deserved. It is still highly valued, and 38,000 tons of It were pro­duced in 1880. Valuable as was the supply, it was not destined to work a revolution in the eco­nomic life of the people. When the time came for the real race, it was found that other States had a superior advantage in the bounty of nature, which had combined their iron-beds with adjacent beds of coal; and Connecticut was compelled to yield to circumstances and turn to other industries. Before the final industrial revolution came on, the commonwealth was convulsed by a political revolution, caused partially by the first movements of manufactures, and in its turn a moving cause of subsequent developments. Connecticut had been Federalist from the first, and the Connecticut Federalist had become almost a peculiar type. Many influences aided the development. The al­most exclusively agricultural, employment of the people rendered them very susceptible to the per­sonal influence of leading men, and community of religious belief strengthened this influence. The leading men were often connected directly or indirectly with commercial interests, which were patronized by the Federal party; or they were leaders in the Congregational Established Church, the natural enemy of Jeffersonian doctrine and. prejudices. The new Democratic party therefore found in Connecticut a phalanx impenetrable to all its efforts to move it. Jefferson's attempt to

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establish a governmental influence in the State in 1801, by removing Elizur Goodrich, the Federal­ist collector of the port of New Haven, and ap­pointing in his place Samuel Bishop, the vener­able father of a rising young Democratic politi­cian, merely made the Connecticut Federalists furious without converting them; and their feel­ing was increased by the embargo, which shut up eighty vessels in the harbor of New Haven alone, and nearly ruined the commerce of the port. Even after the national downfall of the Federal party in 1800, when other States yielded and chose Democratic electors, Connecticut and Delaware were the only States which chose Federal electors at every presidential election, so long as there were Federalists to vote for.

The Episcopal Church had begun to raise its head again after the Revolution, though it was still feeble. Every such symptom of revival, of course, seemed to the Congregationalist Whig simply a revival of Toryism. When the Episco­palians and other dissatisfied elements in New Haven won a substantial victory at the first city election in 1784, Dr. Stiles's diary takes it as a victory of the Tories, and adds, as a natural result the next month, " this day town-meeting voted to re-admit the Tories." The connection with Tory­ism became dimmed in time; but the grievances of the dissatisfied element, the Episcopalians, the " New Lights," the Sandemanians, and other secta-

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ries, remained unabated. In 1791, the act which seemed to Congregationalists the summit of reli­gious freedom was passed : it allowed any dissent-ing society to tax for the support of its own min­ister, and remitted the town tax to such as should lodge a certificate of their dissenting membership with the clerk of an Established Church. This was far from satisfactory to the dissenters. They were discontented that all persons not members of any church were still subject to taxation for the ex­clusive benefit of the Established Church; they as­serted that the privilege of certificate was thwarted by the authorities on little or no legal pretext; and they complained that the treasury of the com­monwealth was still put by the assembly at the service of Yale College, to the exclusion of any other denominational interest.

Finding that the dissenters were not content with what had no doubt seemed large concessions, and welded together more strongly by the national supremacy of their opponents and the ruinous embargo policy, the dominant party of Connecti­cut redoubled its resistance to change. The Con­necticut Democrats considered the charter, re-adopted in 1776 by the assembly, as the corner­stone of their opponents' power. It had, they said, left the powers of government so undefined that the upper house, or council, consisting of but twelve members, had gained an extreme influ­ence ; that seven of the council, a majority, were

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lawyers, able to " appoint all the judges, plead before those judges, and constitute themselves a supreme court of errors to decide in the last resort on the laws of their own making; " and that these same men had complete control of the election machinery of the State, They demanded a con­stitution under which the legislative, judicial, and executive powers should be separated. In August, 1804, a convention of Democrats, or Republicans, was held at New Haven, and endorsed the pro­gramme for the autumn elections. The Federal majority rose higher than ever, and the assembly at its first meeting took steps to punish those mal­contents whom it could reach. It deprived of their commissions five justices of the peace who had been delegates to the New Haven Convention, and censured one of its own members who had spoken too warmly in their behalf. The offending member, when called upon to rise and receive his reprimand from the speaker, interposed the in­genious point of order that there was no rule to prevent his receiving it seated; and the evident embarrassment of the speaker and assembly in dealing with the point took away much of the dig­nity of the punishment.

The rapid passage of the embargo difficulties into open war with Great Britain brought Con­necticut Federalism into the broader field of New England Federalism. The first conflict with the general government came on the employment of

349 the militia of the State. The Constitution gives congress, and an act of congress gave the Presi­dent, the power to call out the militia of the States in three distinctly defined emergencies, - to execute the laws of the Union, to suppress in­surrections, or to repel invasions. As the regular army was drawn off to invade Canada, the Presi­dent called on the States for militia to do garrison duty in its place. The Connecticut governor, Griswold, asked in reply for a specification of the reason for the call, for the law that was to be exe­cuted, the insurrection that was to be suppressed, or the invasion that was to be repelled ; and it is not easy to see how his question was to be an­swered or evaded. At all events, no effective an­swer was made. Connecticut provided a special force of 2,600 men for her own defense, but en­tered her protest, through the assembly, that " the war was unnecessary." The incidents of the war had little to do with Connecticut, with the excep­tion of the blockade of New London by British vessels, and the constant danger of attack there or elsewhere, against which the State was compelled to defend herself, as the general government seemed unable or unwilling to do so. In April, 1814, a British force landed at Say brook and de­stroyed some stores ; and in August the Stonington militia beat off a squadron which attempted to land there, killing and wounding seventy-five men, with the loss of but a few wounded of their own num-

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ber. All the credit due to the State's persistent defense of her own borders was taken away, how­ever, by a charge which Decatur made without even offering evidence for it. Having been foiled several times in attempting to put to sea, he declared that warning of his attempts had been given from the shore by blue-lights; and the name " Blue-light Federalist" was at once used by the administration party as a good title for the dominant party of Connecticut. It was shown, on the other hand, that blue-lights were entirely un­necessary, since Decatur had never taken proper care to keep British emissaries out of his district; but he seems to have gone on the assumption that a failure by Decatur necessarily implied treachery on the part of somebody else.

It is unnecessary to go very far into the origin and history of the Hartford Convention, for Con­necticut had no more special connection with that body than to furnish a meeting-place for it. The grievances which led to it, the neglect of the de­fense of the coast by the general government, and the preponderance of Southern interest In the gov­ernment, were common to Connecticut with the other New England States; but there may have been a reason for the selection of the place. Nearly twenty years before, in 1796, there ap­peared in the " Connecticut Courant," at Hartford, a series of articles signed " Pelham." Written with consummate ability, and apparently from a

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profound prescience of the difficulties which the Union was to encounter, the articles attempted to show that the Southern slave-system made a per­manent Union impossible, and that the Northern States should prepare for separate national exist­ence. The tone of the Hartford Convention's rec­ommendations for constitutional changes have so much of the spirit of these articles that one is dis­posed to think that, if " Pelhain " was not a dele­gate, he was at least a close adviser, and that the desire for his advice was one reason for the selec­tion of the place.

Connecticut's delegates to the convention were Chauncey Goodrich, James Hillhouse, John Tread-well, Zephaniah Swift, Calvin Goddard, Nathaniel Smith, and Roger Minot Sherman, the ablest men of the dominant party. The convention met with closed doors in the building in which the council of the commonwealth had been accustomed to meet, and Democratic leaders at Hartford and Washington looked for the outcome with appre­hension. The Episcopal rector (afterward bishop), Chase, declined to offer prayer at its morning session, explaining that he knew of no form of prayer for rebellion. A fussy Federal officer con­tributed much to the excitement at first; but the substitution of Colonel Jesup preserved the peace, except that a squad of soldiers would now and then march around the building during the sessions, their fifes playing the " Rogue's March." With

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the exception of such little touches of nature as this, the proceedings of the convention are rather a part of national than of local history.

The endorsement of the convention's recommen­dations by the general assembly apparently left the Federalist control of the State complete. In reality, it was at death's door. The Methodist Church had been established in the State in 1789, and had extended with rapidity. It shared in the grievances of the dissenting sects, and reinforced their demands for abatement. Finally, the Demo­cratic party of the State came to the decision to make common cause with the dissenters of all sects, and to fight the political battle on that ground. In January, 1816, a convention at New Haven nominated Oliver Wolcott for governor, and Jared Ingersoll for lieutenant-governor. Wolcott had been a Federalist, Adams's secretary of the treasury, and had been accused by the Democratic newspapers of resorting to arson to cover up frauds in his office. He had since been engaged in busi­ness in New York city. The adoption of his name indicates another element in the alliance. The manufactures of the State, particularly in wool, demanded protection by tariff, and had only a Democratic congress to look to for it. Wolcott's nomination was to give them confidence. Inger­soll was the Episcopal end of the ticket. Thus prepared, the " toleration party," as it called it­self, went into the election. The dominant party,

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alarmed by the prospect, hurried to mate conces­sions, but it was too late. Ingersoll was elected, and Wolcott barely defeated. In 1817 both were elected, with a two-thirds majority of the assem­bly. The first step was to put all sects on an equality as to taxation; the next, to repeal the " Stand-up Law," passed by the Federalists in 1801, by which votes were to be cast in town-meeting by rising, not by secret ballot; and the next, in June, 1818, to call a State convention to frame a constitution. The convention met Au­gust 26, at Hartford, with a Democratic majority of only ten out of two hundred members, just enough to compel mature deliberation and "wise de­cision. It adopted the present constitution Septem­ber 15, which was ratified by a slender majority October 5, The Democrats were rather more dis­satisfied with it than the Federalists, and many of them voted against it.

The constitution provided for a government to consist of a governor, lieutenant-governor, treas­urer, secretary, and comptroller, as State officers, and a general assembly composed of a senate and a house of representatives. The State officers were to be chosen annually by ballot, the general assem­bly to choose when no candidate should receive a majority vote. The representatives were to be chosen by the towns, the proportion of each town to be " as at present practiced, and allowed." The erection of a new town was not to reduce the rep-

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resentation of the town or towns from which it was formed, without the consent of the old towns, and new towns were to have one representative only. The senate was to be chosen by districts, the districts at first numbering twelve, and, since 1828, not less than eighteen or more than twenty-four. The meetings of the general assembly were to be annual, and held alternately at Hartford and New Haven. Since 1873, Hartford has been the sole capital; and, since 1884, the State officers and representatives hold office for two years, and sessions of the general assembly are biennial. The courts were to be a supreme court of errors, a superior court, and inferior courts to be consti­tuted by the assembly. The supreme and superior court justices were to hold office during good be­havior ; their term of office was limited to eight years in 1856. Voters were to be white males of twenty-one years or over, and, as the conditions were simplified in 1845 and 1855, were to have re­sided in the State for one year and in the town for six months, were to have sustained a good moral character, and to be able to read. The selectmen of each town were to enforce the suffrage and election laws of the State.

Religious profession and worship were to be free to all, and no sect was to be preferred by law. No person was to be compelled to join, associate with, support, or remain a member of, any religious

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body ; and all religious bodies were to be entirely equal before the law. Thus ended the connection, of church and state in Connecticut.

One consequence of the establishment of the constitution was the founding of two new colleges. An Episcopal academy had been incorporated at Cheshire in 1801, but it had been impossible to obtain for it a college charter from the general assembly. In 1823 the assembly chartered it as Washington College, locating it at Hartford. Its first commencement was held in 1827, with ten graduates. Its connection with its church has be­come closer during the intervening years, and its work, in conjunction with the related Theological Seminary until 1851, has been of the greatest ser­vice In the training of clergymen. In 1845 its name was changed to Trinity College. Its prop­erty is now valued at over a million dollars, and its buildings are among the finest in Hartford. Its presidents have been: Bishop Brownell, 1823-31 Dr. Wheaton, 1831-37; Dr. Silas Totten, 1837-48; Dr. John Williams, 1848-53; Dr. D. R. Good win, 1853-60; Dr. Samuel Eliot, 1860-64; Dr. J. B. Kerfoot, 1864 - 66 ; Dr. Abner Jackson, 1867-74; Dr. T. R. Pynchon, 1874-83 ; and Dr. George W. Smith, 1883. The Methodist Episco­pal Church in the State also desired an institution for higher education, and it obtained a charter for Wesleyan University without difficulty in 1829, placing it at Middletown. Its presidents have

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been: Dr. Wilbur Fisk, 1831-39; Dr. Stephen Olin, 1839-41; Dr. Nathan Bangs, 1841-42 ; Dr. Stephen Olin, 1842-51; Dr. A, W. Smith, 1851-57; Dr. Joseph Cummings, 1857-75; Dr. Cyrus D. Foss, 1875-80 ; and Dr. John W. Beach, 1880. Its work and resources have increased until its productive funds are now about $700,000, and the annual income from them about $40,000.

The constitution has remained fairly satisfactory during the subsequent growth of the State, except that the representation of the towns has frequently given control of the general assembly to a minority of the popular vote ; and efforts have been made, though as yet without success, to equalize repre­sentation. Whatever may be the present defects of the constitution, it certainly was a great advance on the charter. It seerns to have lifted from the shoulders of the people a load which, however slight, had been sufficient to hamper them in their course up to that time. The original organization of society and government had been exceedingly democratic in 1637 and 1662; and the constitu­tion of 1818 had only brought it into line with the development of democracy, which had passed be­yond the charter. Labor had never been disre­garded or degraded, but mechanical labor had never been considered as quite on a level with agricultural. The diary of John Cotton Smith, the last Federalist governor, is sprinkled with notes of his labor among his men in the harvest

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field and in the other departments of farm work ; and he was but a representative of his class. On the other hand, there are such, eases as that of Roger Sherman, who came into New Milford a shoemaker, and lived to be a senator of the United States ; but they were as uncommon in Connecti­cut before 1818 as that of Smith was common. The mechanic was prima facie vulgar, and his ability was shown by getting out of his class into law or into agriculture, not by increasing his wealth in it. There were mechanics, and good ones, in Connectieut before 1818 ; but the State only began to be a distinctly mechanical common­wealth when the constitution of 1818 had lifted all men into equality, and the mechanic was for the first time on an equality with the Congrega­tional farm-owner.

Even under colonial conditions the mechanical genius of Connecticut had begun to develop the manufacture of the easier forms of hardware; and with this development came the first appearance of the peddler with his wagon. About 1770 the manufacture of tinware was begun in Berlin, eleven miles south of Hartford. This was the be­ginning of the industry with which the name of Connecticut was to be so closely associated, - the production of " Yankee notions." The peddlers carried the manufactures of this and neighboring towns over the country in wagons, exchanging them for local products and reaping a double profit

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on the exchange. Transactions of a darker dye than any legitimate profit were also laid to the account of these peddlers: their malignant in­genuity was debited with the introduction of wooden nutmegs, bass-wood hams, oak-leaf cigars, and similar frauds. Undoubtedly there was much fraudulent work: the loose conditions of such a trade, when ignorance on one side was always tempting any latent dishonesty on the other, would make some fraud inevitable. But the essence of the accusation was in the rivalry of local trade, in the jealousy of unsuccessful competitors, provoked by the sudden success of Connecticut workmen in their new field. They had found a sphere in which the niggardliness of nature could not check them. The lack of coal as fuel might weigh heavily against the value of their iron-mines, but the ingenuity of the workmen was a possession which could not be taken from the commonwealth. From the little beginning at Berlin has grown up a great system of towns, in the district along the Naugatuck and Connecticut rivers, devoted to the manufacture of hardware, of brass goods, of any­thing and everything in which the accuracy, skill, and ingenuity of the workman can make up for the distance of the place of manufacture from the source of the raw material and from the places of sale. Here are Ansonia, Waterbiny, New Britain, Meriden, and a bewildering maze of other towns, all of which have been developed by water-power

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and human ingenuity; older places like Hartford, New Haven, and Norwich have felt the reflex in­fluence and joined. In the race ; and quite new places, like Bridgeport, have sprung to life and activity under the impulse derived from the first tin pail made at Berlin. Before that time, every enterprising man kept his eyes keenly on the be­nevolence of Nature, and looked to the use of some­thing produced in the commonwealth which he could improve for sale ; since that time, such men, no longer heeding local resources, have scoured the world for materials, have brought them to Connecticut and passed them through the crucible of Connecticut ingenuity, and have found in the results a mine richer than the Spaniard's longings could compass.

The clock manufacture in Connecticut, with its adjuncts or derivatives, is an excellent example of the manner in which the mechanics of the com­monwealth have made their ingenuity of public service. Wooden clocks, of the old high pattern, were made at Waterbury as long ago as 1790. About 1793 Eli Terry went thence to Plymouth and began a manufacture of his own by water-power, his first patent of improvements being taken out in 1797. About 1814 he introduced the new and far more convenient pattern of smaller mantel clocks. Chauncey Jerome began the manufacture of brass clocks about 1821, and with this the modern field of Connecticut ingenuity was opened.

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The parts of the clocks were soon made inter­changeable, so that one workman could give his entire time to the production of each part, while increased production made the whole clock far cheaper ; and the application of machinery to the production of the parts soon made prices still cheaper. In 1840 the value of the clocks pro­duced in the State, almost entirely for home con­sumption, was over a million dollars, and the manufacturers were ready to reach out after foreign trade. So low had they driven cost and prices that their first exports paid more than 2000% profit. The story goes that the first cargo of Con­necticut clocks for the English market was Invoiced so low, in spite of this abnormal profit, that the custom-house officers, suspecting undervaluation, enforced their right to take the cargo at its invoice value. This suited the exporters so well that they immediately shipped another cargo, which met the same fate. A third cargo staggered the custom house, and it went out of the clock business. Since that time the world has been supplied with machine-made Connecticut clocks and watches.

The little streams which fall into Long Island Sound are easily dammed, have abundance of wa­ter, and have been utilized from the first as a source of power. When Dr. Howe, of New York, invented his machine for making pins at one oper­ation, his most urgent need was for competent mechanics. These could be found only among

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the Connecticut men who had been working on brass clocks, and the manufacture of pins was es­tablished at Derby and Birmingham in 1335 and 1838. The making of pins brought with it the establishment of brass-mills for the production of the necessary wire ; and the surplus of this pro­duction added the manufacture of about every­thing into which brass plate and wire could be stamped or twisted. Thus a constantly widening field has been offered for the peculiar talents of the Connecticut workman. " He is usually a Yankee of Yankees by birth, and of a tempera­ment thoughtful to dreaminess. His natural bent is strongly towards mechanical pursuits, and he finds his way very early in life into the work­shop. Impatient of the fetters which trade soci­eties forge for less independent minds, he delights to make his own bargain with his employer, and, whatever be the work on which he is engaged, bends the whole force of an acute but narrow in­telligence to scheming means for accomplishing It easily. Unlike the English mechanic, whom a different education and different circumstances have taught to believe his own interest ill served by facilitating the operations of the workshop, the Connecticut man is profoundly convinced to the contrary. He cherishes a fixed idea of creating a monopoly in some branch of manufacture by es­tablishing an overwhelming superiority over the methods of production already existing in that

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branch. To ' get up' a machine, or a series of machines, for this purpose, is his one aim and am­bition. If he succeeds, supported by patents and the ready aid which capital gives to promising novelties in the States, he may revolutionize an industry, forcing opponents who produce in the old way altogether out of the market, while bene­fiting the consumer and making his own fortune at the same time. The workshops of Massachu­setts, Rhode Island, and especially of Connecticut, are full of such men. Usually tall, thin, reflec­tive, and taciturn, but clever, and, above all things, free, - the equals, although mechanics, of the capitalist upon whose ready alliance they can count, -they are an element of incalculable value to American industry. Their method of attack­ing manufacturing problems is one which, intelli­gently handled, must command markets by si­multaneously improving qualities and cheapening prices. We ourselves certainly aim, as they do, at the specialization of manufacture, but one scarcely treads upon the threshold of clock-land before feeling how much more universally the sys­tem is being applied in the States than here [in England]. Tools and processes which we are inclined to consider as exceptionally clever are the commonplaces of American shops; and the de­termination to do nothing by hand which can be done by a machine is a marked characteristic of the workmen there, while it scarcely exists among operatives here."

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This description, by a competent English, ob­server (Mr. Daniel Pigeon), has been extracted and inserted in spite of the unjust characteriza­tion of the workman's intelligence as " narrow," for the sake of the clearer view which is always gained by an observation from the outside. The characteristics which he notes are not at all con­fined to the clock and brass industries: wherever human ingenuity, in the peculiar form it has taken in Connecticut, can enable a manufactory to com­pete successfully with its more favorably situated rivals, the attempt has been made to localize it in the commonwealth. When Eli Whitney, of New Haven, had been robbed of the profits of his wonderfully simple invention of the cotton-gin, he turned his attention to the manufacture of arms. The United States government wanted a supply of firearms, and Whitney, without any facilities for making them, took the contract for the work, rely­ing justly on Connecticut ingenuity to find a way. Everything had to be created; but the means on which he relied and with which he succeeded were the persistent substitution of machinery for hand­work, the encouragement of invention, and. the use of equivalent parts, so that each part could be made by the thousand and yet any part would fit the others. The completion of the contract es­tablished a successful arms-factory at Whitney-ville, near New Haven. Here, in 1848, Samuel Colt began the manufacture of his revolver, which

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he had invented while a boy of fifteen, during a voyage to India, and had patented in 1836. In 1850 he removed to Hartford, and the Sharp's Rifle Company followed Mm the next year. The Winchester Arms Company of New Haven has since taken another variety of work. There have been times when contending armies have both been armed from the little State of Connecticut; and yet the State itself has furnished hardly a particle of the raw material, its entire contribu­tion being the ingenuity of its workmen and the mechanical genius of its inventors.

It would be unjust to leave it to be inferred that this mechanical ingenuity has been narrow in its scope or narrowing in its results. Putting aside such cases as those of Whitney and Good­year, in which invention has been applied to the broadest and most useful fields, the later records of the commonwealth have been crowded with the names of men who have owed their rise to genius of this type, and have done no discredit to any employment to which the commonwealth has seen fit to call them. To specify would necessarily be to do injustice to those whose names would have to be omitted. One must hold to the general statement that many of the best public servants of the commonwealth, since its great industrial revolution began, have owed their rise to their success in some branch of mechanical industry. Connecticut manufacturers have regularly risen

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from the ranks, and when they have been trans­ferred from private to public business, they have held their own well in the inevitable comparison with their professional rivals.

The character of the Connecticut workman has led to a peculiar kindness of relations between himself and his employer. It would be impossi­ble to go into particulars of the thought/fulness of Connecticut employers for their employees, of the well-understood equality of relations between them, and of the consideration of employees for the necessities of employers, without seeming to advertise those few establishments that must be selected for illustration. Any one who will take the trouble to examine for himself into the rela­tions between the real Connecticut workman and his employers need not go far into the State be­fore being satisfied. The institutions which Hooker founded still retain their influence over the descendants of the first settlers.

And yet one cannot but feel some fear for the future of the Connecticut mechanic, and, with him, of Connecticut industries. The tendency of the organization of industry is so strongly toward forms of combination of labor which cannot but be a drawback upon complete individual initiative, that it must be reflected in Connecticut. Indeed, it has already begun to affect the relations between employer and employed. The report of the Con­necticut Labor Bureau for 1885 shows, in its

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accounts of the grievances alleged by employees, and of the remedies which they suggest, a spirit which has not been common in the State hereto­fore. Whether it is justified or not, is not the question : the main fact is that it exists, and that there is danger that it may result in forms of labor which would be fatal to individualized production. Other commonwealths, more favored by nature, may continue to produce with success under sys­tems which substitute combined for individualized labor. But Connecticut has no such advantage; her long lead in the industrial race has come purely from the high individual ability of her workmen, and any tendency which operates against this element of prosperity cannot but affect the welfare of the commonwealth.

The reputation of the Connecticut workman has been so long established that one is apt to think of the commonwealth of the last century as only a smaller edition of the Connecticut of the present. It has seemed advisable, therefore, to lay stress upon the fact that the Connecticut of the present is the creation of this century; that Connecticut was almost as much an agricultural commonwealth in 1810 as she is now a mechani­cal and manufacturing commonwealth. How far the forward step which democracy in the State took in 1818 was a cause or only a symptom of the revolution which followed so rapidly, is more than any one can say; but it is difficult to resist

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the conviction that the relation between them was an intimate one.

Apart from the peculiarly State features of the industrial development, at least one feature of it has had a national and international influence, as Mr. E. E. Hale has pointed out. The Connecticut Joint Stock Act of 1837, framed by Mr. Theodore Hinsdale, a manufacturer of the commonwealth, introduced the corporation in the form under which we now generally know it. Its principle was copied by almost every State of the Union, and by the English Limited Liability Act of 1855 ; and the effects of its simple principle upon the in­dustrial development of the whole modern world are quite beyond calculation. All that can be done here is to notice the wide influence of a single Connecticut manufacturer's idea, and to call at­tention to this as another instance of the close connection of democracy with modern industrial development.

The census of 1880 showed that the population of Connecticut was 622,700, of which 492,708 was native and 129,992 foreign. From the eighth State in order of population in 1790, it had fallen to twenty-eighth in 1880. Of this population, 112,915 were at work in the 4,488 factories of the State, the capital of these being $120,480,275, the annual wages $43,501,518; value of mate­rials $102,183,341, and that of the finished pro­duct $185,697,211. The manufacture of firearms,

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clocks, India-rubber goods, wagons and carriages, hardware, britannia and table ware, cutlery, cot­ton and woolen goods, machinery, and sewing-machines were the leading industries ; but patent industries, in which Connecticut leads all the States, are the most numerous sources of her pros­perity. The assessed valuation of the State was $228,791,267 for real estate, and $98,386,118 for personal property, these of course representing a much larger real value. With 1,24% of the population of the United States, its people held 3.24% of the national registered bond-debt. There were in 1885 eighty-four savings-banks, with 256,097 depositors, and deposits amounting to $92,481,525; ten stock fire-insurance companies, with assets of $24,040,193; seventeen mutual fire-insurance companies, with assets of $1,195,297 ; and nine life-insurance companies, with gross re­ceipts of $110,889,326 and liabilities of $99,321,-018. There were twenty-two railroads, with a length of 974 miles, and a total value of about $90,000,000. Their general management has been excellent: in 1884 they carried 16,957,574 pas­sengers, of whom but one was fatally injured.

Agriculture still occupied about 45,000 persons, with a capital of about $125,000,000 invested in 30,598 farms, containing 1,642,188 acres of im­proved and 811,353 acres of unimproved land. The average size of the farms had decreased from 106 acres in 1850, 99 acres in 1860, and 93 acres-in 1870, to 80 acres in 1880.

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The commonwealth government still remains a comparatively simple one. The annual revenues and expenditures are about a million and a half. About one third of this is drawn from the towns by taxation, another third from taxes on railroad companies, and the bulk of the remainder from taxes on mutual fire-insurance companies and sav­ings-banks. The total debt, December 1, 1885, was $4,271,000; and the permanent school fund, $2,028,124, The principal items of expenditure, outside of interest on the debt, were about $200,000 each for judicial expenses, common schools, and humane institutions, and about $100,000 each for legislative expenses and the militia.

Before closing this brief summary of the ma­terial progress of the commonwealth during the century, a still briefer space may fairly be given to its political history during the same period. At the beginning of the century, as has been said al­ready, Connecticut was a steadily Federalist State, and it continued so until the election of 1818, or as long as the Federal party existed. In presiden­tial elections it has been the steadiest in its gen­eral opposition to the national Democratic party.

It has cast its electoral vote for Federal, Whig, or Republican candidates at every election except five: 1820, 1836, 1852,1876, and 1884. But the popu­lar majorities have always been very slight; and the feeling of the minority party that it had " a fighting chance " in the State has been kept up by

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its share of success in the frequently recurring State elections. The pluralities have usually been exceedingly small. In the election of 1884 the Democratic vote was 67,182 and the Republican 65,898, so that the Democratic plurality, which de­cided the State's electoral vote, was but 1,284, and there was a scattering vote besides of 4,179, or over thrice the deciding plurality.

The completeness of town supremacy over local concerns gave rise to two incidents in the political history of the State, which those who treat of it would willingly pass over in silence, if that were possible. At the very outset of the anti-slavery struggle in 1831 the free negroes of the United States determined to establish a college for their young men, with a mechanical depart­ment. New Haven was fixed upon as the location, partly by reason of its academic atmosphere, and partly by reason of the State's advantages for mechanical education. The announcement raised a storm of opposition in New Haven. The city officers and voters, in public meeting, denounced the project, and directed every means to be taken to defeat it. Such action was at once fatal to the proposed college, and it came to nothing. Early in 1883, Prudence Crandall, a young Quaker girl of Windham county, wrote to Garrison that she proposed to turn her girls' school at Canterbury into a school for colored children. The change Was carried out during the year, and raised a more

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angry local storm than that which had been met in New Haven, A town meeting declared the school a nuisance ; the pupils were insulted on the streets; the vagrant act was invoked against them without success; and at last the leaders of the opposition went to the general assembly, and obtained the passage of an act forbidding the in­troduction into the State of negroes from another State, for purposes of instruction, without the written consent of the selectmen of the town. Under the act Miss Crandall was arrested, and by the advice of her friends went to jail for a night. Trial after trial failed to convict her ; and " boy­cotting," as it is now called, was brought into play in its most aggravated forms. Even her church took part, and excluded her from attendance with her pupils. Finally, all other means having failed, her house was broken open at midnight by a mob, the inmates were turned out of doors, and the house and its contents were ruined. Miss Crandall then gave up her enterprise.

One would not care to be retained for the de­fense in the consideration of the Crandall episode ; he can only wonder that Connecticut men could have been guilty of the persecutions which were inflicted upon a girl whose pictured countenance is almost a sufficient plea for her. But there are some points which should be brought to the reader's attention as essential to a just judgment. The commonwealth of Connecticut was a most unfor-

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tunate place for such an experiment, simply be­cause of its peculiar local constitution. On the one hand, it was a great responsibility upon a little Windham county town to assume the burden of an odium which far larger places would not have ventured to take up at the time. Towns in other States might shirk responsibility by pleading that such an establishment was the work of a superior power; in a Connecticut town it must be taken as the act and deed of the town itself. On the other hand, the universal feeling in the State, that a town should have the amplest liberty of control in its local affairs, made it easy for the town's con­trolling influence to get from the general assembly the act recognizing its selectmen's right to decide on this question, - an act whose form was so closely in accord with the general tenor of the Connecti­cut system that legislators must have felt it dif­ficult to find objections to it, even if they disliked its new principle. Popular passion had thus a strong impelling force and a temptingly clear field before it, and the opportunity thus afforded may do something to explain the whole affair. At least, the second consideration should do something to exonerate the people of the commonwealth at large.

With the exception of these unpleasant features, the political history of the commonwealth has been uneventful, and the only friction yet notice­able is in some points in which the old forms of

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local government have seemed to become too nar­row for the commonwealth's growth. Most of the dissatisfaction has come from the constitution of the general assembly. The representation of the political units of the State in it has always been somewhat peculiar, owing to the survival of the original elements. The lower house has never been considered a popular body: it is the histori­cal representative of the towns, with all their original feeling of town equality. A majority of the lower house need not represent anything ap­proaching a popular majority. The senate was intended to represent the popular majority, but the twenty-four districts from which its members are selected have offered too tempting a prize for gerrymandering to be resisted. In other States, it is the apportionment of the lower house which is usually subjected to this process ; in Connecticut, it is the senate. The party which finds itself in a majority on the popular vote, and yet in a mi­nority in the lower house, is apt to charge injustice there also. And yet the historical student, how­ever much he may regret unequal apportionment in the senate, cannot but regret any attempt to disturb the ancient apportionment in the lower house. It is one of the few remnants of the origi­nal constitution of the commonwealth, and speaks too plainly the history of Connecticut to be will­ingly abandoned.

CHAPTER XIX

CONNECTICUT IN THE WAR FOB THE UNION.

Now that the heat and passion of the war for the Union have so far died away, it must be ad­mitted that the hasty rush into hostilities was largely due to the prevalent belief in the seceding States that the North and West would not fight. The belief rested on different grounds as to the two sections. The West would not fight because it was in her interest to secure peaceable use of the Mississippi, and thus mutual interest was to guard the South from an enemy for whom it had consider­able respect. The manufacturing regions of the North would not fight because they dared not; and if they should attempt to fight, the South would ask no better or safer amusement than a conflict with them. History should have taught all men more wisdom : the Flemish artisan had long ago shown the world how his craft could fight upon occasion, and the Northern mechanics only repeated and emphasized the lesson. The aversion to war as an abstract principle was strongest among such as the typical Connecticut workman. He could see no use in it; it was not in the line

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of bis training or ambitions ; it interfered seriously with all that he longed to do in the world. All this really made him a more dangerous enemy, for when he was forced into warlike occupation he went to work at it with a peculiar determina­tion to finish the matter and get rid of it as soon as possible. But the average Southerner's opinion was undoubtedly voiced by Governor Hammond of South Carolina, when he said that the " manual laborers and operatives of the North" were " es­sentially slaves," " the mudsills of society," the difference being that " our slaves are hired for life and are well compensated; yours are hired by the day and not cared for." Above otters, he would probably have been amused by the notion of an actual regiment of Connecticut mechanics and tin-peddlers as a possible element in the deci­sion of the great question.

It is a fair instance of the commonwealth's in­difference to military glory that her militia system was so completely out of gear in 1861 that she was unable to provide even the single regiment of militia assigned to her in the first call of President Lincoln. Up to the last moment her people were intensely busy with the machinery and mechani­cal industries which had given them so large a place in the material development of the country.

A remarkable feature of the war was the group of " war governors " who directed the energies of their States during the struggle, and stand out

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above the mass of those who have occupied the office. To this group Connecticut made a notable contribution in the person of her war governor, William A. Buckingham, of Norwich, one of the class of manufacturers and business men who have so often served the commonwealth, January 17, 1861, he issued his proclamation to the militia of the State, warning them that their services might be needed at any moment, and urging them to be "ready to render such service as any exigency might demand." The ranks of the militia were not filled as they should have been ; but the pru­dent governor, on his personal responsibility, or­dered the quartermaster to buy equipments for 5,000 men. They did good service just when they were most needed.

In the spring of 1861, Governor Buckingham was reflected by a vote of 48,012 to 41,003 for James C. Loomis. April 16, he called for a regi­ment of volunteers, as there was not even a regi­ment of organized militia to fill President Lincoln's call on the commonwealth. The step was un­authorized by law, but the governor relied on the general assembly to validate it at the coming ses­sion. In this he represented the people exactly, for they had caught fire at the capture of Sumter. More than five times the State's quota volunteered, - fifty-four companies instead of ten. But the curious feature of the case, as illustrating the survival underneath of the primitive constitution

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of tie commonwealth, is the way in which the work was done. The commonwealth, was met by an emergency utterly unprovided for by law; the legislature was not in session, and the governor was the only available representative of common­wealth power. All this apparent chaos did not disturb the people in the least. They fell back at once upon the resources of their town system, as they would have done in 1637. Town meetings all over the State met and exercised their re­served powers to tide over the crisis. Money was voted to support the families of volunteers, and to insure a prompt response to the governor's call. By tens and fifteens and twenty-fives, the little towns poured in their contributions of men; the cities and large towns sent larger numbers, and added larger contributions of money ; and soon the governor was justified in going to Washing­ton and Inducing the administration to accept three regiments from Connecticut instead of one.

When the legislature met in May, it ratified the governor's acts, and appropriated $2,000,000 for military expenses. Extra pay, to the amount of $30 a year, was voted to each enlisted man during the war, besides support for families of volunteers, six dollars per month for the wife and two dollars per month for each child under fourteen. The support was to continue until the expiration of the term of enlistment, even though the soldier should die before that time. Beyond such general

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acts as these, it may be said with considerable accuracy that the common wealth organization did little, and had little to do, for the conduct of the war: the war was managed, as far as Connecticut was concerned, by the towns, just as in the Ameri­can Revolution. Many of them are still stagger-ing under the load of debt which, bears witness to their unselfish devotion to the cause.

All through the war, the votes of the two great parties remained about as close as in 1861. The minority contained a " peace party," and its pro­ceedings, raising of peace flags, etc., were a con­stant exasperation to the people. The legislature met it in a fashion quite characteristic of Connec­ticut. It voted that any such flag was a " nui­sance," to be abated by any constable or justice of the peace of a town, or by the sheriff of the county. Even here, however, unofficial represen­tatives of the towns were usually first to abate the nuisance, as the town committees of safety had done nearly a century before.

The first Connecticut regiment did not reach Washington until May 13. To compensate for the delay, it came perfectly prepared, even to 50,000 rounds of ammunition, and rations and forage for twenty days. The second and third regiments followed within a day or two, all in the same con­dition of complete preparation. The three took part in. the battle of Bull Run. They led the ad-vance, opened the battle, were not demoralized,

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and covered the retreat, - a pretty fair record for " mudsills " in their first battle. To illustrate the business habits which the Connecticut men carried into war-making, it is worth while to note that, when they marched back into their quarters near Washington, they not only brought their own. camp equipage in perfect condition, but the camp equipage of three other regiments, and two pieces of artillery, which they had found abandoned and had thoughtfully taken possession of on the way. The three regiments were three-months' men, but their members reenlisted almost to a man; and the high character of these first Connecticut rep­resentatives in the field may be estimated from the fact that more than five hundred of them be­came commissioned officers daring the war.

Call after call was made for troops, and the old commonwealth kept her quota more than full. She had in the service at various times twenty-eight regiments of Infantry, two regiments and three batteries of artillery, and one regiment and a squadron of cavalry, numbering 54,882 volun­teers of all terms of service, or, If the terms are all reduced to a three-years' average, 48,181 three-years' men, 6,698 more than her quota. For a State with but about 80,000 voters, and about 50,000 able-bodied men on her militia rolls in 1861, the percentage of volunteers is very high; indeed, not more than one or two States excelled it. There were 97 officers and 1,094 men killed

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in action, 48 officers and 663 men who died from woonds, 63 officers and 3,246 men who died from disease, and 21 officers and 389 men who were re­ported missing.

The men who filled the Connecticut rolls were to an unusual degree typical of the best elements of the commonwealth's history. Many of the names show that their possessors were of foreign blood or birth, but the mass of them are those which have been familiar to the State since its co­lonial foundation. It was peculiarly appropriate that almost the first victim should have been Theo­dore Winthrop of New Haven, for he drew his blood from Connecticut's first governor, John Winthrop. To one who has followed the history of the State with any close attention, the rolls of her regiments are productive of a curious sensa­tion. He finds the same names which he has seen again and again in the town histories; he can al­most tell from the recurring names on the rolls the town from which each company was enlisted; and it sometimes seems as if the dead soldiers of the Pequot or King Philip's war had sprung to life again to answer the cry of a new country. And yet the alien names, whose owners made up so large a part of the State's military history, are as fair a reason for satisfaction, for they are a stand­ing proof that Connecticut's catholic spirit of hos­pitality has been met by a loyal adoption of the institutions and spirit of the old commonwealth.

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Any attempt to enumerate the contributions of Connecticut to the military and naval service of the United States must be embarrassing. It would seem unfair to omit the names, like those of Grant and Sherman, of men who drew their blood from Connecticut, and their powers for good from the institutions of her founders ; and yet such a list would stretch out far beyond the space which could possibly be given to it. But even though the attention is confined to the common­wealth's more direct contributions, the list is long enough to be embarrassing. To the navy, Con­necticut contributed its secretary, Gideon Welles, rear admirals Andrew H. Foote of New Haven, and F. H. Gregory of Norwalk, and commodores John Rogers and C. R. P. Rogers of New London, and R. B. Hitchcock. In the army, Winthrop has been mentioned already. Among the Connecti­cut major-generals were Alfred H. Terry of New Haven, Darius N. Couch of Norwalk, John Sedg-wick of Cornwall Hollow, J. K. F. Mansfield of Middletown, Jos. A. Mower of New London, J. R. Hawley of Hartford, H. W. Birge of Norwich, and R. O. Tyler of Hartford; and among the brigadier-generals, Nathaniel Lyon of Eastford, G, A, Stedman of Hartford, O.S. Ferry of Nor­walk, Daniel Tyler and Edward Harland of Nor­wich, and A. von Steinwehr of Wallingford. So large a contribution of distinguished officers is doubly remarkable as coming from so small a

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State, and from a State which did not enter the conflict out of any diseased passion for military glory, but simply out of the national necessity of the case. If we should attempt to pass below the higher grades of officers, the list of Connecticut men who fought their way into command of reeri- ments or companies, in the service of their own or other States, would be almost endless. Common­wealth and towns have marked their gratitude to their representatives in the war. They have shown that a commonwealth's aversion to war is entirely compatible with the most unyielding stub­bornness when it is forced upon her, and that the eminence of her sons in the arts of peace can never again be taken as a safe indication that they are easy victims for attack. It was with no small pride that the people of Connecticut watched the close of the war, as one of her children held Lee's army in an iron grasp on the James, while another was moving up irresistibly from the far South, sweeping up the remaining forces of the Confederacy into a great net, from which there was no escape. And the military historian of the commonwealth may well be permitted to close this chapter for her: -

" The first great martyrs of the war - Ells-worth, Winthrop, Ward, and Lyon - were of Con­necticut stock. A Connecticut general, with Con­necticut regiments, opened the battle of Bull Run and closed it; and a Connecticut regiment was

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marshaled in front of the farm-house at Appomat-tox when Lee surrendered to a soldier of Connec­ticut blood, A Connecticut flag first displaced the palmetto upon the soil of South Carolina; a Con­necticut flag was first planted in Mississippi; a Connecticut flag was first unfurled before New Orleans. Upon the reclaimed walls of Pulaski, Donelson, Macon, Jackson, St. Philip, Morgan, Wagner, Sumter, Fisher, our State left its inefface­able mark. The sons of Connecticut followed the illustrious grandson of Connecticut as he swung his army with amazing momentum from the fast­nesses of Tennessee to the Confederacy's vital centre. At Antietam, Gettysburg, and in all the fierce campaigns of Virginia, our soldiers won crimson glories ; and at Port Hudson they were the very first and readiest. . . . On the banks of every river of the South, and in the battle-smoke of every contested ridge and mountain-peak, the sons of Connecticut have stood and patiently struggled. In every ransomed State we have a holy acre on which the storm has left its emerald waves, - three thousand indistinguishable hillocks on lonely lake and stream, in field and tangled thicket."

If the writer of the foregoing paragraph had repeated the stately dirge of the general court of two hundred years ago, it would have been but a just connection between the spirit of the fathers and of their children: " The bitter cold, the tarled

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swamp, the tedious march, the fort, the numerous and stubborn enemy they contended with, for their God, king, and. country, be their trophies over death. . . . Our mourners, over all the colony, witness for our men that they were not unfaithful in that day."

CHAPTER XX

RECENT DEVELOPMENT.

in the twenty years that close the nineteenth century the most striking features in the develop­ment of Connecticut have shown themselves in the economic rather than in the political organization. Earlier chapters have described the rise of town and commonwealth governments; they tell the story of the difficulties through which the people struggled that they might establish a satisfactory system for the conduct of their public affairs. No better proof can be given of the success of their efforts than the uneventful character of the po­litical history of the State through most of the nineteenth century. Inside the framework of government that time had tested, citizens could devote themselves contentedly to their private affairs; they could take advantage, with freedom and security, of the wonderful opportunities of economic progress that the century has offered; and they have effected a revolution in the economic organization of the State. It will he the purpose of this chapter to describe the economic changes of the past twenty years, the period in which these changes have been most rapid, and to notice what

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development there has been in the political organi­zation.

By1880 Connecticut had already become a dis-tinctly industrial State, Nearly one half of the workers of the commonwealth were engaged in manufacturing and mechanical trades, and only one in five was occupied with agriculture, the branch of production which had once been all-embracing. The number of farmers has not varied greatly in the last twenty years, and in a sense, as will be shown later, it is wrong to speak of the " decline " of agriculture in the State. Relatively, however, to other branches of production, agricul­ture has certainly lost ground. Each of the two census decades has seen the addition, in round numbers, of thirty thousand new wage-earners to manufactures and of twenty thousand to trade and transportation, so that agriculture is now entirely overshadowed by the modern industries and counts to-day scarcely more than one in ten of the workers of the State.

The growth of manufacturing is to be measured not alone by the increase in the number of per­sons engaged in it. That number includes at all periods many petty artisans, who in a sense are manufacturers, as they work up raw material into finished forms. These artisans perform services highly valued in any community, but they lack the peculiar efficiency of modern labor, organized on the capitalist system, and in their social and

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political relations they belong rather with the farm- ers than in the most characteristic parts of mod­ern society, The growth in Connecticut manufac­tures has corne not from the increase in this class, but, in the modern style, from the increase in fac­tory laborers, working with machines and power furnished by their employers. While the number of persons engaged in manufactures has risen in twenty years from 112,000 to 176,000, the capital invested has grown from $120,000,000 to $314,000,000; and the disproportion between the ratios of growth implies that manufactures have changed not only quantitatively but qualitatively as well, and that Connecticut has kept pace with other industrial States In accepting the capitalist form of organization.

The social and political problems arising from this new form of organization are sufficiently well known to all students of modern conditions, and such students scarcely need to be reminded of the great reason for the change, its economic efficiency. The reason appears clearly in reviewing the in­dustries of Connecticut at the present time. The seventeen leading manufactures in the State, com­prising over three fifths of the total number of persons engaged in manufacture and nearly three fifths in value of the total product, are all organized on the factory system, and include only 993 out of a total of 9128 manufacturing establishments. I give the list, ranking the industries according to

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the number of persons employed in each, and itali­cizing the names of those in which Connecticut takes first place among all the States, in respect to the value of the product: textiles (especially cotton, silk, woolen, and worsted), brass manufac­tures, foundry and machine shop products, hard­ware, corsets, fur hats, plated and brittania ware, ammunition, cutlery, clocks, rubber goods, car­riages, sewing machines, iron and steel, paper and wood pulp, needles and pins, electrical apparatus and supplies.

In the product of manufactures, measured per head of population, Connecticut has now reached the second place among the States, having passed Massachusetts and standing next to Rhode Island. Still more striking, in view of the relatively small size of the State, is the fact that it exceeds every one of the other States in nine (or eleven if the brass manufacture be divided into its parts) out of ninety-nine industries specified in the census of 1900. The commonwealth has shown its ability not only to keep its place at home, but to extend its business at the expense of foreign rivals, and has begun to export a considerable share of its products abroad. In some manufactures, like those of clocks and fire-arms, the foreign trade has always been considerable, but the ability to export has shown itself in many other industries in the closing years of the century, and large factories have sent one half or more of their output of machines and tools to foreign countries.

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What reasons explain this superiority of Con­necticut in manufacturing enterprise ? The ques­tion is answered as follows in a recent volume of the United States Census: " The preeminence of the State in manufacturing is due in part to its excellent communication by rail and water with all parts of the country ; to its geographical location, by which it can handle a large export trade; to its water-power; to its plentiful supplies of labor and capital, the former gathered easily in the great centres of the East, and the latter coming to it not alone from, its profitable manufactures bat also from its large insurance and banking interests; and to its joint-stock laws."

Nothing is said of the physical resources of the State. Its mines have fallen into obscurity and its agriculture produces only for household con­sumption. Connecticut sends to Pennsylvania for its iron, to Montana for its copper, to the South for its cotton, to China for its raw silk, and all over the world for its wool. It imports even its power from abroad, in the form of coal; the water power of the State is small when compared with that of other States, and plays an inconsiderable part in manufacturing. Other factors cited in the quotation are of undoubted importance. Connec­ticut has its full share of capital, and satisfactory rules under which this may be invested, especially now that a general corporation law has been passed; and the State is well situated for the marketing of its products.

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There remains the factor of labor. The author has said in an earlier chapter (page 366), that the leadership of Connecticut in manufactures "has come purely from the high individual ability of her workmen." The State, then, won its place by the quality as much as by the quantity of its in­dustrial laborers. Are we to understand that it keeps its place by the same means, - has it now not only an adequate supply of labor but a supply of exceptionally good labor as well ?

Some indication of the individual ability of a people in manufactures is furnished by the number of inventions they bring forth. The inventions of Connecticut have been celebrated for generations, and if we follow the number produced in recent times we find that the ingenuity of the people is still prolific. From 1850 to 1900 Connecticut has always held the first place among the States for the number of patents issued in comparison with the total population ; in recent census years when the statistics have been compiled, the people of the commonwealth have taken out ordinarily about one patent to every thousand inhabitants. In the last decade, however, there has been a perceptible falling off in the rate, and consideration will show this to be natural and probably permanent. The very object of many inventions is a machine that will accomplish automatically what before has been entrusted to human skill; unceasing demand for such machines comes from manufacturers who

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want to substitute cheap and unskilled labor for that which is intelligent and costly. So long as the demand for such machines continues it is likely to be supplied in large part by Connecticut Inge­nuity and enterprise; the tradition of experiment and invention has been established in the State, and will be maintained by a select body of mechan­ics, who are largely of native origin, descendants of the original whittling Yankees.

The demand has been satisfied, however, in many industries, and in them a cheaper grade of laborers has been established, lower in intelligence than the workers of fifty years ago. Of these laborers many are foreigners. In each of the past two decades the foreign-born population of Connecticut has increased by over 50,000, and amounts now altogether to 238,000. Many of the foreign-born have entered domestic service, many have gone Into some petty trade or become common laborers, but many others, just how many it is impossible to say, have found employment in manufactures. In some districts French Canadians have become the predominant element, and few factories of any size lack English, Irish, Germans, and Swedes on their pay-rolls. European experts are not im­pressed now, as once they were, with the superior quality of individual mill operatives in this coun­try ; they find much the same people whom -they left on the other side of the water, and they have begun to doubt whether the efficiency of our mills

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is due to any improvement in labor brought on by the conditions of life here.

Another cause must be sought to explain the efficiency of American manufactures in general, of Connecticut manufactures in particular. It is found in the perfection of organization in this coun­try and in the State. No patents are granted for inventions in factory organization, which enable the duties of manufacture to be distributed so that every worker in every department is called upon for all that he is qualified to do, no less and no more. Inventions of this kind, however, effect as real an economy as those concerned with the im­provement of technical processes, and play a deci­sive part when the competition of manufacture lies between great social groups such as form our modern factories. There is significance in the fact that one of Connecticut's leading manufactures, the pin industry, is just that which Adam Smith selected long ago to demonstrate the advantages of division, or organization, of labor. Connecticut has kept its place in manufacturing not by its phy­sical resources, not even by a superior supply of capital and labor, so much as by the shrewdness and energy of its industrial leaders, who have sur­passed their rivals in the efficient combination of the forces that are employed in making and mar­keting goods.

We have carried down from an earlier time the idea of the importance of the individual laborer in

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manufactures, and we are slow to recognize with due appreciation the services of the factory masters. Connecticut owes a considerable number of its large manufacturing establishments to the few men, sometimes members of a single family, who have practically created each, and maintained and strengthened it through changing times. The State may well be proud of its manufacturing aris­tocracy ; only by the rule of the best could its In­dustries have been brought to their present flour­ishing condition.

Further proof, if one were needed, of the part played by leading men in developing the industries of the State, is furnished by the history of another form of business enterprise, - that concerned with life and fire insurance. In the insurance business many of the factors that complicate the question of success in manufacturing are eliminated, labor, among other factors, is a negligible quantity. The Connecticut Insurance companies have had to meet the competition of companies enjoying the finan­cial advantages of a situation in the money-centre of the country, and have suffered from the hostile legislation of certain States, but they still carry on a considerable part of the insurance business of the country, and stand second to none in the esteem of the insurance world. They owe their success to the honesty and economy of their corpo­rate management.

It will not be necessary, for the purposes of this

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chapter, to describe at length the changes that have taken place in other occupations allied in some respects to manufactures. In trade and transpor­tation, in professional and in domestic and per­sonal services, there has been an increase not only in the absolute numbers but also in the proportion of the population engaged. The transportation system has been strengthened by the addition of the electric street railroads, and, partly as a result of this change, there has been a development in the mercantile organization similar to that which has taken place in manufacturing, building up the large stores at the expense of their competi­tors.

The agriculture of the State cannot be dis­missed quite so summarily. Even on sentimental grounds interest would attach to a branch of pro­duction which was for centuries the mainstay of the commonwealth. There are practical reasons as well, however, inviting attention to the sub­ject. Any industry acquires an importance out of proportion to the number of persons engaged in it when it shows symptoms of depression such as have appeared in Connecticut agriculture; it is the one sheep astray from the fold, deserving more care than the ninety and nine who are safe. Even the economic results of the decline of any industry represent a danger to the community, but the danger is intensified when the results ap­pear in the political organization as well. So in

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Connecticut, whose political constitution grew up on the basis of agriculture and whose political wel­fare depends now on the wholesome condition of the rural towns, every fact is of importance which indicates the coarse and the probable future of the agricultural crisis through which the State is pass-ing.

The Connecticut Bureau of Labor Statistics investigated the condition of 693 farms in the State in 1888, and received from the farmers who conducted them reports showing that more than half of the number, 378, were worked at a loss. The farmers included their family expenses, it Is true, with the costs of operation; setting these ex­penses aside, the number of farms that ran behind from a purely business standpoint would be re­duced to 42. The fact remains, however, if we can regard these figures as typical of conditions in the State at large, that more than half of the Con­necticut farmers at this period found it impossible to make both ends meet by the methods that they were then pursuing and on the standard of living to which they were accustomed. The United States statistics, taken two years later, were also discouraging; they showed that the number of farms, the acreage of farm land, the value of farm property, and the value of farm. products had all decreased in the State in the ten years following 1880. We can admire the spirit, but we cannot fail to see an unhappy

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significance, in he motto displayed over Con­necticut's agricultural exhibit at the Columbian Exposition of 1893: " Connecticut's best crop her sons and daughters."

The reasons for this depression were not peculiar to Connecticut, and are not far to seek. The im­mense advance in manufactures and trade had at­tracted to the cities some of the best elements of the rural population. The improvements in transporta­tion freed the growing population of the cities from dependence on the country immediately surround­ing for food supplies, and exposed the Connecticut farmers to the competition of producers favored with far greater advantages of soil or climate. It may be doubted whether even at this time the farmers of the State, taken all. together, were ab­solutely worse off than they had been in the past. There had been a sharp rise, it is true, in the price of farm labor, but most of the objects of consump­tion on the farm, especially manufactured articles, cost much less than formerly. Even those farmers, however, who managed to maintain their former Money income, and who consequently were able to enjoy more comforts of life than before, measured their standard against that prevailing in the cities, and regarded themselves as declining in prosperity because they were being passed by others.

Adjustment to these conditions has, however, taken place in the ten years that closed the cen­tury. The number of farms, the acreage of farm

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land, and the value of farm property all increased slightly in that period, while in the value of farm products there has been the striking growth from $17,000,000 in 1890 to $28,000,000 in 1900. The Connecticut farmers, therefore, have solved their problem ; they have done it almost unaided, and in the best Way, too, not by limiting their expenditures but by increasing their income. They have reached this result by devoting them­selves to products especially suited to their en­vironment, and by studying economy in raising and marketing the product.

The direction of the change is indicated in a sentence which I quote from an address delivered before the State agricultural convention in 1898 : " Grass is the only crop outside of special lines which can be grown on our Eastern farms at a real profit." Less than one fifth of the farms of the State now report their main income as coming from miscellaneous sources, while over one quarter are devoted to the raising of live stock, and nearly one third to dairy production. There has been a de­crease in the cultivation of every cereal except In­dian corn, and a large part of the improved land has been turned back to pasture. Connecticut is now preeminently a dairy State, By the improve­ment in the breed of stock, by the organization of creameries, of which there are now over fifty in the State, and by the application of scientific principles in dairy production, the farmers are in

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a position to take full advantage of the profitable market which the large city groups offer to them.

Space forbids a consideration of the special branches of production which have developed from the miscellaneous farming of the past. The cul­ture of fruit for market is largely a growth of re­cent years. Through the influence of a few leaders, fruit of unsurpassed quality, and in rapidly increas­ing quantity, is now grown in the State; much " abandoned " farm land has been planted with peaches, and now yields good returns. The tobacco culture is a characteristic Connecticut industry, especially in its most recent development. The tobacco farmers have long been accustomed practi­cally to manufacture their soil, by adding to it just the chemical constituents which they wanted in the crop; now they manufacture climate too, by the erection of cloth shades covering sometimes acres; and experiments have proved that they can raise in this way a leaf equal in all respects to the average imported Sumatra, thought the profits of the venture as a business undertaking are still in doubt.

The economic development of the past twenty years has tended to a constant increase of the urban population, which since 1880 has included more than half of the inhabitants of the State. All but 12 of the 168 towns, it is true, report some manu­facture carried on in them, but the proportion of manufacturing done in cities has increased, and

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over nine tenths of the manufactured product come from the 61 principal towns. The old form of town government, winch continues to work fairly well in places that have not changed greatly from their original size and character, has proved clumsy and inefficient in larger groups; certain of its parts remain everywhere throughout the State, but it has constantly lost ground so far as regards the substance of power. The list of cities, given in a previous chapter, has doubled in the last two decades, and the increase in the number of boroughs has been almost as rapid. In the cities the labor element has gained a power which is still denied to it in State affairs, and in several cases in recent years a " labor mayor " has been elected.

If we measure the importance of political or­ganizations by the money standard, the municipal groups of Connecticut are more deserving of atten­tion than the State government; in a recent year the combined expenditures of towns, boroughs, and cities was over $10,000,000, more than threefold the expenditures of the State treasury. The study of municipal politics would be unprofitable, how­ever, without going into details, for which there Is no space here, and the remainder of this chapter must be reserved for the consideration, necessarily very brief, of State affairs.

The chief interest centres in the strains devel­oped in the State constitution by the industrial and urban growth of the commonwealth. The consti-

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tution, it will be,remembered, entrusted very ex­tensive powers to a legislature in which the towns, as such, enjoyed peculiar influence. The constitu- tion did not provide for a recognition in the field of politics of such extensive economic and social changes as have occurred, and recent years have been marked by attempts, to secure its revision.

In two important points, the mode of electing a governor and the composition of the State Senate, revision has been effected. The two great politi­cal parties of the State have shown nearly equal strength at the, polls, and the slight diversion of votes effected by a third party, the Prohibitionists, has on four occasions since 1880 prevented any candidate from receiving the absolute majority re­quired by the constitution ; the Democratic candi­date might receive a popular plurality of several thousand, but the right of election would go to the General Assembly, and there his rival would be chosen. In 1890 the popular vote was very close, but on the face of the returns the Democratic candidate, Luzon B. Morris, had a majority over all of 26. There was a question, however, about some ballots which local election officials had re­jected, but which would, if counted, increase the total vote so as to leave no candidate with a ma­jority. The lower house of the legislature, which was as usual Republican, asserted the right of the General Assembly to examine and correct the vote as it came to them from the canvassing board of

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the State ; the Senate, then Democratic, denied tills right, and over this question there was a dead­lock: which lasted throughout the session, and stopped legislative business entirely. The Demo­cratic candidate for comptroller was conceded a majority and took office, but the other candidates were left hanging in the air, and for lack of " duly qualified" successors the Republican incumbents continued in office from the previous administra­tion. The bitterness arising from this conflict did not blind people to the injustice, or at least the in­expediency, of the system which made it possible. To this grievance another was added. The con­stitutional provisions touching the State Seriate made it impossible to pay regard to population in its apportionment, and had led to gross inequalities in the upper house, where alone representation by population was possible. In 1900 one district had tenfold the population of another. Popular sen­timent against these features of the constitution grew so strong that the dominant party was forced to action, and, in 1892, took the first steps neces­sary for their revision; encouraged by Republican gains they retraced their steps in 1894, but the "lost amendments" were only deferred, and were finally passed and accepted by the people in 1901. The chief State officials are now elected by a plu­rality vote of the people, and the Senate is to be reapportioned in districts more nearly equal in population.

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There remain to be considered questions still unsettled, of which the most important is the com­position of the House of Representatives. The constitution of 1818 fixed representation on the existing basis, with provisions entirely inadequate to meet the changes in the distribution of popu­lation which have since taken place. Towns of a few hundred inhabitants have as many representa­tives as cities approaching or exceeding a hundred thousand; even among the small towns there is no consistency in the apportionment of representa­tives. New Haven, with, a population of 108,027, has still but two representatives ; Union, with 428, has two; Hamden, with 4,626, has but one. It seems hardly worth while to quote the statistical comparisons further; the most vigorous imagina­tion is not likely to exceed the facts in picturing the present condition.

In the last General Assembly the farmers num­bered 89 out of a total of 255, and exceeded the members of any other vocation. The custom of reelection has grown more and more rare in the course of tirne, and rotation has taken its place; scarcely one representative in twenty is elected to the succeeding Assembly. The great majority of representatives come from the country districts, without previous experience in legislation, and un­trained to the scientific treatment of the complex legal and fiscal questions which form a large part of State legislation. Ignorance rather than cor-

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ruption is the serious charge to be brought against the rural representatives. Indirect bribery, paying a man " for his time " when he voted, was formerly common in the towns; it has been checked to some extent by the passage of a secret ballot law, and, with more efficiency probably, by the action of the better elements in the towns. Election expenses are still unduly large, it is said, and legislative corruption is constantly hinted at, but it would be hard to prove that rural voters and legislators are worse than their fellows in the cities.

Critics of the existing system of representation hold it responsible for the lack of laws to regulate the lobby and to punish corrupt practices; they charge against it also selfishness and extravagance in the conduct of the State's finances. The tax on towns was suspended in 1891, and has not since been resumed; and the public revenues come now almost entirely from taxes on corporations. Some of the abundant revenue has been applied to the reduction of the debt, but other parts have been expended on objects of doubtful utility, espe­cially in the multiplication of offices, and the sum total of expenditures has grown rapidly. None will question the need of better roads in Con­necticut, or the propriety of the State sharing the burden of their construction ; it seems significant, however, that in 1895, when the State first con­tributed to this object, it paid but one third of the expense, in 1897 it paid half, and in 1899 It was

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charged with two thirds or three fourths, while the total appropriation for the assistance of the towns increased at each session.

Proposals for a change in the basis of represen­tation had been made before 1850, and repeated from time to time, but the discontent culminated at the end of the century. The advocates of re­form despaired of reaching their end by securing an amendment of the constitution in the regular form, which prescribes a majority vote in the lower house of one legislature, a two thirds vote of both houses in the next, and finally a ratification by the people. They demanded that the revision should be effected by a convention, and though to the lawyers this seemed "disorderly," as the organic law specified other means, the General Assembly consented at last to take the will of the people on the subject, and by over 20,000 majority the convention was voted.

While the popular vote was so strongly In favor of the convention, the returns show that over three fourths of the towns voted against it, and as the body was composed of one delegate from each town it was certain to be very critical, if not actually hostile, toward any scheme of revision. Over sixty different plans to change the system of represen­tation were brought forward, and it is noteworthy that of these all but one, which never received serious consideration, accepted the town idea, and left the control of the House of Representatives

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with the towns of less than 5000 inhabitants. After discussion lasting over four months a plan was finally accepted which assured to each town one representative, gave one additional to towns having over 2000 inhabitants, and added one more for each 50,000 above 50,000. This plan would have taken 30 members from small towns, and added 29 to the larger places, diminishing the num­bers of the House by 1. It contemplated also an increase in the Senate. Beside this mild reform in representation the convention proposed further changes in the constitution, among others prohibit­ing the appointment of members of the legislature to other public office during the term for which they were elected, and giving the governor power to veto parts of appropriation bills.

The plan of representation proposed by the con­vention was naturally opposed at the polls by the people of the smaller towns, and it failed to satisfy the inhabitants of the larger towns and the cities. Interest flagged when the outcome of the conven­tion was known, and the popular vote on the pro­posed revisions was " remarkable alike for the significance of Its emphatic disapproval and the Insignificance of its total volume. Practically 5 per cent, of the registered voters favored the new constitution, 10 per cent, disapproved it, and 85 per cent, did not vote either way." The student of Connecticut politics from whom these words are quoted finds, however, in the past history of

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the State, reason to believe that the question will not be allowed to remain long unsettled, and looks to the legislature to make some reasonable change which will decide it. Thus much is certain, that in the immediate future no change will be made which will destroy the peculiar feature of the Connecticut constitution, Its principle of town representation.

APPENDIX

THE CONSTITUTION OF 1639.

(Abbreviations only are modernized.)

forasmuch as it hath pleased the All mighty God by the wise disposition of his diuyne providence so to Or­der and dispose of things that we the Inhabitants and Residents of Windsor, Harteford and Wethersfield are now cohabiting and dwelling in and vppon the River of Conectecotte and the Lands thereunto adioyneing ; And well knowing where a people are gathered togather the word of God requires that to mayntayne the peace and vnion of such a people there should be an orderly and decent Gouerment established according to God, to or­der and dispose of the affayres of the people at all sea­sons as occation shall require ; doe therefore assotiate and conioyne our selues to be as one Publike State or Commonwelth; and doe, for our selues and our Suc­cessors and such as shall be adioyned to vs att any tyme hereafter, enter into Combination and Confederation togather, to mayntayne and presearue the liberty and purity of the gospell of our Lord Jesus which we now professe, as also the disciplyne of the Churches, which ac­cording to the truth of the said gospell is now practised

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amongst vs ; As also in our Ciuell Affaires to be guided and gouerned according to such Lawes, Rules, Orders and decrees as shall be made, ordered & decreed, as fol-loweth : -

1. It is Ordered, sentenced aad decreed, that there shall be yerely two generall Assemblies or Courts, the first on the second thursday in Aprill, the other the sec­ond thursday in September, following; the first shall be called the Courte of Election, wherein shall be yerely Chosen from tyme to tyme soe many Magestrats and other publike Officers as shall be found requisitte; Whereof one to be chosen Gouernour for the yeare en-sueing and vntill another be chosen, and noe other Mag-estrate to be chosen for more than one yeare ; provided alwayes there be sixe chosen besids the Gouernour; which being chosen and sworn according to an Oath re­corded for that purpose shall here power to administer justice according to the Lawes here established, and for want thereof according to the rule of the word of God; which choise shall be made by all that are admitted free­men and haue taken the Oath of Fidellity, and. doe co-habitte within this Jurisdiction, (hauing beene admitted Inhabitants by the major part of the Towne wherein they Hue) 1 or the mayor parte of such as shall be then present.

2. It is Ordered, sen tensed and decreed, that the Election of the aforesaid Magestrats shall be on this manner: euery person present and quallified for choyse shall bring in (to the persons deputed to receaue them) one single paper with the name of him written in yt whom he desires to haue Gouernour, and he that hath 1 Inserted at a later period.

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the greatest number of papers shall be Gouernour for that yeare. And the rest of the Magestrats or publike Officers to be chosen in this manner: The Secretary for the tyme being shall first read the names of all that are to be put to choise and then shall generally nominate them distinctly, and euery one that would haue the per­son nominated to be chosen shall bring in one single paper written vppon, and he that would not haue him chosen shall bring in a blanke; and euery one that hath more written papers than blanks shall be a Magestrat for that yeare ; which papers shall be receaned and told by one or more that shall be then chosen by the court and sworne to be faythfull therein; but in ease there should not be sixe chosen as aforesaid, besids the Gou­ernor, out of those which are nominated, then he or they which haue the most written papers shall be a Mage-strate or Magestrats for the ensueing yeare, to make vp the foresaid number.

3. It is Ordered, sentenced and decreed, that the Sec­retary shall not nominate any person, nor shall any per­son be chosen newly into the Magestracy which was not propownded in some Generall Courte before, to be nom­inated the next Election; and to that end yt shall be lawfull for ech of the Townes aforesaid by their depu-tyes to nominate any two whom they conceaue fitte to be putte to Election ; and the Courte may ad so many more as they iudge requisitt.

4. It is Ordered, sentenced and decreed that noe person be chosen Gouernor aboue once in two yeares, and that the Gouernor be alwayes a member of some ap­proved congregation, and formerly of the Magestracy within this Jurisdiction; and all the Magestrats Free-

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men of this Commonwelth : and that no Magestrate or other publike officer shall execute any parte of his or their Office before they are generally sworne, which. shall be done in the face of the Gourte if they be pres­ent, and in case of absence by some deputed for that purpose.

5. It is Ordered, sentenced, and decreed, that to the aforesaid Courte of Election the seuerall Townes shall send their deputyes, and when the Elections are ended they may proceed in any publike searuice as at other Courts. Also the other Generall Courte in September shall be for makeing of lawes, and any other pablike oc-cation which conserus the good of the Commonwelth.

6. It is Ordered, sentenced and decreed, that the Gou-ernor shall, either by himselfe or by the secretary, send out summons to the Constables of euery Towne for the cauleing of these two standing Courts, one month at lest before their seuerall tymes : And also if the Gouernor and the gretest parte of the Magestrats see cause vppon any spetiall occation to call a generall Courte, they may giue order to the secretary soe to doe within fowerteene dayes warneing : and if vrgent necessity so require, vp­pon a shorter notice, giueing sufficient grownds for yt to the deputyes when they meete, or els be questioned for the same ; And if the Gouernor and Mayor parte of Magestrats shall ether neglect or refuse to call the two Generall standing Courts or ether of them, as also at other tymes when the occations of the Commonwelth re­quire, the Freemen thereof, or the Mayor parte of them, shall petition to them soe to doe: if then yt be ether denyed or neglected the said Freemen or the Mayor parte of them shall haue power to giue order to the

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Constables of the senerall Townes to doe the same, and so may meete togather, and chuse to themselues a Mod­erator, and may proceed to do any Aete of power, which any other Generall Courte may.

7. It is Ordered, sentenced and decreed that after there are warrants giuen out for any of the said Gen­erall Courts, the Constable or Constables of ech Towne shall forthwith give notice distinctly to the Inhabitants of the same, in some Publike Assembly or by goeing or sending from bowse to howse, that at a place and tyme by him or them lymited and sett, they meet and assem­ble themselues togather to elect and chuse certen dep­utyes to be att the Generall Courte then following to agitate the afayres of the commonwelth; which said Deputyes shall be chosen by all that are admitted! In­habitants in the seuerall Townes and haue taken the oath of fidellity ; prouided that non be chosen a Deputy for any Generall Courte which is not a Freeman of this Commonwelth.

The foresaid deputyes shall be chosen in manner following: euery person that is present and quallified as before expressed, shall bring the names of such, written in seuerall papers, as they desire to haue chosen for that Imployment, and these 3 or 4, more or lesse, being the number agreed on to be chosen for that tyme, that haue greatest number of papers written for them shall be deputyes for that Courte ; whose names shall be en­dorsed on the backe side of the warrant and returned into the Courte, with the Constable or Constables hand vnto the same.

8. It is Ordered, sentenced and decreed, that "Wynd-sor, Hartford and Wethersfield shall haue power, ech

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Towne, to send fower of their freemen as their deputyes to euery Generall Courte; and whatsoeuer other Townes shall be hereafter added to this Jurisdiction, they shall send so many depufcyes as the Courte shall judge meete, a resonable proportion to the number of freemen that are in the said Townes being to be attended therein; which deputyes shall haue the power of the whole Towne to giue their voats and alowance to all such lawes and orders as may be for the publike good, and unto which the said Townes are to be bownd.

9. It is Ordered and decreed, that the deputyes thus chosen shall haue power and liberty to appoynt a tyme and a place of meeting togather before any Generall Courte to adulse and consult of all such things as may concerne the good of the publike, as also to examine their owne Elections, whether according to the order, and if they or the gretest parte of them find any such election to be illegall they may seclud such for present from their meeting, and returne the same and their re-sons to the Courte; and if yt proue true, the Courte may fyne the party or partyes so intruding and the Towne, if they see cause, and giue out a warrant to goe to a newe election in a legall way, ether in parte or in whole. Also the said deputyes shall haue power to fyne any that shall be disorderly at their meetings, or for not comming in due tyme or place according to ap-poyntment; and they may returne the said fynes Into the Courte If yt be refused to be paid, and the Tres-urer to take notice of yt, and to estreete or levy the same as he does other fynes.

10. It is Ordered, sentenced and decreed, that euery Generall Courte, except such as through neglect of the

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Governor and. the greatest parte of Magestrats the Free­men themselves doe call, shall consist of the Gouernor, or some one chosen, to moderate the Court, and 4 other Magestrats at lest, with the mayor parte of the deputyes of the seuerall Townes legally chosen ; and in case the Freemen or mayor parte of them, through neglect or re­fusall of the Gouernor and mayor parte of the mage-strats, shall call a Courte, yt shall consist of the mayor parte of Freemen that are present or their deputyes, with a Moderator chosen by them: In which said Gen-erall Courts shall consist the supreme power of the Commonwelth, and they only shall haue power to make lawes or ropeale them, to graunt leuyes, to admitt of Freemen, dispose of lands vndisposed of, to seuerall Townes or persons, and also shall haue power to call ether Courte or Magestrate or any other person what-soeuer into question for any misdemeanour, and may for just causes displace or deale otherwise according to the nature of the offence ; and also may deale in any other matter that concerns the good of this commonwelth, ex-cepte election of Magestrats, which shall be done by the whole boddy of Freemen.

In which Courte the Gouernour or Moderator shall haue power to order the Courte to giue liberty of spech, and silence vnceasonable and disorderly speakeings, to put all things to voate, antl in case the voate be equall to haue the casting voice. But non of these Courts shall be adiorned or dissolued without the consent of the maior parte of the Court.

11. It is ordered, sentenced and decreed, that when any Generall Courte vppon the occations of the Com­monwelth haue agreed vppon any summe or summes of

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mony to be leuyed vppon the seuerall Townes within this Jurisdiction, that a Committee be chosen to sett out and appoynt what shall be the proportion of euery Towne to pay of the said leuy, provided the Committees be made vp of an equall number out of each Towne.

14th January, 1638, the 11 Orders abouesaid are voted.

[Until 1752, the legal year in England began March 25 (Lady Day), not January 1. All the days between January 1 and March 25 of the year which we now call 1639 were therefore then a part of the year 1638; so that the date of the Constitution is given by its own terms as 1638, instead of 1639. The whole document may be found in Connecticut Public Records, I. 20-25.]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. The general histories of the United States: bancroft, dreth, bryant and gat, schouler, mcmaster, pitkin, holmes, et als.

2. palfrey's History of New England; satage's Winthrop's History of New England; bradford's New England Chronol­ogy ; hubbard's General History of New England; oliver's Puritan Commonwealth, chapter ii. (Episcopalian view); back-us's History of New England (Baptist view); church's History of King Philip's War; drake's French and Indian War in New England; Mass. Hist, Soc. Publications, particularly garden-er's Relation of the Pequot Wars, and vincent's True Rela­tion ; mather's Magnalia Christi; bacon's Genesis of the New England Churches; felt's Ecclesiastical History of New Eng­land.

3. doyle's American Colonies; lodge's English Colonies in America; force's Colonial Tracts.

4. hutohinson's History of Massachusetts; arnold's His-tory of Rhode Island ; bartlett's Records of Rhode Island; hall's History of Vermont; brodhead's History of New York; o'callaghan's History of New Netherlands; 2 O'CAL-laghan's Documentary History of New York (Leisler Adminis­tration) ; hazard's Pennsylvania Archives ; sheafer's Histori­cal Map of Pennsylvania; regents' Report on the Boundaries of the State of New York ; bowen's Boundary Disputes of Con­necticut ; prime's History of Long Island; thompson's His­tory of Long Island; wood's First Settlement of Long Island Towns.

5. The general histories of Connecticut: trumbull, dwight, hollister, and carpenter and arthur ; atwater's History

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of New Haven; levekmore's Republic of New Haven; lam-beet's History of New Haven Colony ; Colonial Records of Con­necticut, edited by J. H, thumbull and C, J, hoadly ; Colo­nial Records of New Haven, edited by hoadly ; barber's Connecticut Historical Collections.

6. Connecticut Historical Society Proceedings, particularly hooker's Letter to Winthrop, bulkeley's People's Right to Election, hoadly's Public Seal of Connecticut, The Hartford Church Controversy, and Correspondence of Silas Deane; New Haven Historical Society Papers, particularly bacon's Civil Government in New Haven, tbowbridge's History of the Long Wharf, bronson's Connecticut Currency, whitaker's Early History of Southold, goodrich's Invasion of New Haven, dex-ter's Memoranda on the Regicides, trowbridge's Ancient Houses in New Haven, beakdsley's Mohegan Land Contro­versy, E. C. baldwin's Branford Annals, S. E. baldwin's New York Boundary Line, bronson's Early Government of Connecticut, and dexter's Early Relations between New Neth-erland and New England; Connecticut Valley Historical Society Papers, particularly the Review of petees's History; percival's Geology of Connecticut. See also the Introduction to palfrey ; db forest's Indians of Connecticut; 2 hazard's State Papers (New England Commissioners) ; brodhead's Government of Sir Edmund Andros.

7. J. H. trumbull's Notes on the Constitutions of Connecti­cut, and True Blue Laws; pbters's General History of Connec­ticut; hinman's Code of 1650, and Antiquities of Connecticut; fowler's Local Law in Connecticut; bacon's Contributions to the Ecclesiastical History of Connecticut; bbardsley's History of the Episcopal Church In Connecticut; johnstokt's Genesis of a New England State (Connecticut).

8. miner's History of Wyoming ; H. M. hoyt's Brief of the Wyoming Title, with the very complete bibliography at page 101, the volume being the fairest and best account of the contro­versy that I have found.

9. phelps's History of the Newgate of Connecticut; elliot's Debates; President dwight's Travels in New England and New York; wood's Administration of John Adams; good-rich's Recollections of a Life-Time; dwight's History of the

417

Hartford Convention ; adams's New England Federalism (Gould's letter) ; J, H. trumbull's Defence of Stonington; bushnell's Historical Estimate of Connecticut (in his Work and Play); bishop's History of American Manufactures; An Historical and Industrial Review of Connecticut (1884); E, E. Hale's Brown Univ. Address; everest's Poets of Connecticut; french's Art and Artists in Connecticut; crokfut and mor­ris's History of Connecticut during the Recent War.

10. stuart's Hartford in the Olden Time; trumbxjll's His­tory of Hartford County (the first volume has been used most largely); walker's 250th Anniversary of the First Church of Hartford; stiles's History of Ancient Windsor, and Supple­ment ; hall's History of Norwalk ; caulkins's History of New London, and History of Norwich; huntington's History of Stamford; mead's History of Greenwich; gardiner's Notes on East Hampton (N. Y. Hist, Soc. Pub., 1869) ; holland's His­tory of Western Massachusetts; morris's Early History of Springfield, Mass.; cothren's History of Ancient Woodbury; chapin's History of Glastenbury ; larned's History of Wind-ham County; Kilbourne's Biographical History of Litchfleld. County ; woodruff's History of Litchfield ; bronson's His­tory of Waterbury ; roy's History of Norfolk ; davis's History of Wallingford and Meriden; taintor's Records of Colchester ; phelps's History of Simsbury, Granby, and Canton ; boyd's Annals of Winchester; andrews's History of New Britain; fowler's History of Durham; todd's History of Redding ; sharpe's History of Seymour; orcutt's History of Wolcott, and History of Torrington ; dexter's New Haven in 1784, and Town Names in Connecticut.

11. kingsley's Historical Discourse, New Haven, 1838; bacon's Historical Discourses, New Haven, 1838; woglsey's Historical Discourse, Yale College, 1850; Litchfield County Centennial Addresses, 1851; field's Centennial Address, Mid-dletown, 1853; Gilman's Historical Address, Norwich, 1859; W. L. kingsley's Yale College : A Sketch of its History.

12. allen's Biographical Dictionary ; sparks's Library of American Biography; winthrop's Life and Letters of Win-throp (senior); Mass. Hist. Soc, Coll., scr. 5, vol. 8 (Winthrop Papers); New York Hist. Soc. Coll., ser. 2, vol. ii.; moore's

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Memoir of Eaton; stiles's History of the Regicides; warren's Three Judges; stuart's Life of Jonathan Trumbull; beards-let's Life of William Samuel Johnson; humpheeys's Life of Putnam; cutler's Life of Putnam; wolcott Memorial; holmes's Life of President Stiles ; sprague's Life of President Dwight; westcott's Life of John Fitch; good win's Genea­logical Notes; flanders' or van santvqokd's Lives of the Chief Justices (for Ellsworth); lossing-'s or sanderson's Lives of the Signers (for Sherman, Huntlngton, Williams, and Wol-cott); ward's Life of Pereival; pierce's Life of Goodyear ; howe's Eminent Mechanics ; hoppin's Life of A. H. Foote; stowe's Men of Our Time (for W. A, Buckingham).

note, As the foregoing list was prepared by Prof. Johnston to indicate the authorities on which he based his text, there is, clearly, no warrant for its revision. Attention may, however, be drawn to the following articles which have appeared since the first edition of this volume, and which present views differing from those of Prof. Johnston in important points: C. M. an-drews's River Towns of Connecticut, Baltimore, 1889, and Ori­gin of Connecticut Towns in Annals of Arner. Acad, Pol. Sci., Oct., 1890; H, L, osgood's Connecticut as a Corporate Colony, in Pol. Sci. Quarterly, June, 1899; roger" welles's Constitutional His­tory of Connecticut, in Conn. Magazine, Feb. - March, 1899. The most important additions to the material for the history of Con­necticut are to be found in the publications of the State and of State, county, and local societies, and in local histories, of which a number have been published in recent years.

The principal authorities for the supplementary chapter are: U. S. Census; Public Documents of Connecticut, especially Re-ports of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and of the Board of Agriculture; gold's Handbook of Connecticut Agriculture] arti­cles on the gubernatorial controversy by harrison, baldwin, and blake, in New Englander, April, 1891; deming's Town Rule in Connecticut, in Pol. Sci. Quarterly, Sept., 1889; M. B. gary's Connecticut Constitution, 1900, and Struggle for Con­stitutional Reform, in Yale Law Journal, Jan., 1901 ; C. H. clark's Connecticut Convention, in Yale Review, Aug., 1902.

Statistics in this chapter are cited generally in round numbers.