yield an abject submission to a government which was little better than usurpation—a government which acknowledged no constitutional limits to its authority, and denied the natural rights of meñ or they must seek relief by an appeal to a majority of the people in their sovereign capacity. They chose the latter; and although the result was disastrous to some of its principal agents, yet the time will come when the world will applaud their course, and justify their conduct.

We shall now proceed to point out some of the principal causes which induced the people to desire a reform.

And first, it was thought to be inconsistent with the honor and dignity of the people of a sovereign state to suffer the government to be regulated by a musty charter, which never had any authority except as a commission from a British King. After the authority of the crown was repudiated, the legislature assumed absolute and unlimited power; that body claimed the right to regulate the elective franchise, and made and unmade their own electors; it held and exercised a most improper and dangerous influence over the judiciary by making the judges dependent on that body for their annual election. This was the precarious tenure by which every judge in the state held his office.

In such a condition, there could be no safe and independent judiciary. Both the judges and the causes which they were to determine became the sport of party controversies. It has been elsewhere eloquently said, "A judge should sit serenely above all the storms of political strife, that he may rightly divide the justice of the law between man and man; he should have

nothing to hope from party ascendency, and nothing to fear from the fall of political friends."

The Hon. William E. Goddard, late Professor of Moral Philosophy in Brown University, in an address delivered at the inauguration of the legislature under the present constitution, at Newport, May 3, 1843, made use of the following language, as appears from a printed report of that address :

"In truth, my fellow-citizens, without a judiciary which feels itself to be independent of the legislative power, no constitution is worth the parchment upon which it is engrossed. Without a judiciary there can be no freedom under a popular government. Without such a judiciary, civilization in its higher forms can make no advance."

And, strange as it may seem, this declaration was publicly and solemnly made by one who eulogized the old royal charter, and bitterly opposed the people's constitution.

The restriction of the privilege of suffrage to freeholders and their eldest sons excluded from voting quite a large class of citizens, and incidentally became the cause of much fraud and corruption at the polls. In 1841, and for many years previous, the right to vote was limited by law to such only as could show a deed of some freehold estate, supposed to be worth one hundred and thirty-four dollars, and the eldest sons of such freeholders. In times of strong party excitement, a great portion of the unscrupulous non-freeholders were qualified to vote by sham deeds of estates in which they really had no interest; and to so great an extent was this

fraud carried, that in many towns it was supposed that one fourth of all who voted in town meeting were so qualified. In many instances one sham deed, by qualifying the father, made two voters by qualifying his eldest son at the same time. It will be recollected, also, that many of those who consented to be thus quaiified were not of the most reliable class of citizens, because many high-minded men despised such dishonest

means.

When her brave soldiers returned from the war of the revolution, scarred, broken down, and exhausted by their long service in the cause of their country, a great majority found themselves excluded and shut out from all participation in that government for which they had labored so ardently, and sacrificed so much. They found the government a landed oligarchy, and because they had become poor in the service of their country, and had little left but worthless continental paper, although they had been victorious abroad, they found themselves outlawed at home. They were told that non-freeholders were not considered as citizens, that they had no natural rights, and that the word people meant those, and those only, who had been made such by legislative

enactment.

As agriculture declined, and commercial, mechanical, and manufacturing employments increased, the number excluded from the privilege of voting was continually on the increase, so that some in every town, and large numbers of good citizens in many towns, were cut off from the privilege of voting. Many of these disfranchised citizens owned large amounts of personal estate;

among them were men of learning, enterprise, and character. In many towns they paid a large share of the taxes, and throughout the state they constituted by far the largest portion of the military; they were required by law to purchase and provide, themselves with arms and military equipments, to perform duty at stated times in every year, and to hold themselves in readiness for any service which the state authorities might require of them; and yet, for all this, they received no compensation, but were denounced by the charter authorities as the rabble, that had no interest in the government of their country.

The charter legislature claimed to be the sovereign power of the state, and exercised unrestricted control over the elective franchise; and although in 1841, only real estate of the value of one hundred and thirty-four dollars was required to make a freeman, yet the amount required had formerly been much higher. In 1729, two hundred pounds, or more than six hundred dollars, was required, and in 1746, the legislature passed an act restricting the right to vote to those only who at the time of their voting possessed in their own right real estate of the value of four hundred pounds, or something more than thirteen hundred dollars; yet the right of primogeniture was always respected, and the eldest sons of qualified freeholders were always allowed to vote; and this feudal right was continued by the charter government up to the time of the present constitution.

There

There can be no more dangerous feature in any government than the control of the elective franchise by

the legislature; because, in that case, there is no legal impediment between freedom and despotism.

But the denial of the right to vote was not the only disability to which non-freeholders were subjected. A non-freeholder, by himself, without the aid of some freeholder, was not protected by the laws of the state; he could not commence or maintain any action for the collection of a debt, and if he was assaulted and wounded in his person, he could have no process against the offender, unless some freeholder would consent to indorse his name upon the back of the writ. By statute this was required in every case before a nonfreeholder could pray out a writ, and without such indorsement the law afforded him no protection whatever. Again, non-freeholders were not allowed to serve as jurors, yet they were required in all cases to be tried by juries composed exclusively of freeholders; the nonfreeholder, therefore, was not tried by a jury of his peers, but by a privileged class to which he did not belong. This was a flagrant violation of the great principle of common law, which allows every man to be tried by his equals.

It is said that the charter of Charles II. was first drawn up in Rhode Island, according to the views and wishes of the principal inhabitants, and subsequently carried to England to receive the royal signature; and there is little doubt that the assignment of representatives to the several towns was fair, and based upon the population at that time. Newport, which had the largest number of inhabitants, was allowed six; Portsmouth, Warwick, and Providence, being perhaps about