The Fathers of the Constitution [11]
qualifications, the proportion of citizens who voted steadily increased. The fact is that many of the people did not care to vote. Why should they, when they were only registering the will or the wishes of their superiors? But among the relatively small number who constituted the governing class there was a high standard of intelligence. Popular magazines were unheard of and newspapers were infrequent, so that men depended largely upon correspondence and personal intercourse for the interchange of ideas. There was time, however, for careful reading of the few available books; there was time for thought, for writing, for discussion, and for social intercourse. It hardly seems too much to say, therefore, that there was seldom, if ever, a people-certainly never a people scattered over so wide a territory-who knew so much about government as did this controlling element of the people of the United States. The practical character, as well as the political genius, of the Americans was never shown to better advantage than at the outbreak of the Revolution, when the quarrel with the mother country was manifesting itself in the conflict between the Governors, and other appointed agents of the Crown, and the popularly elected houses of the colonial legislatures. When the Crown resorted to dissolving the legislatures, the revolting colonists kept up and observed the forms of government. When the legislature was prevented from meeting, the members would come together and call themselves a congress or a convention, and, instead of adopting laws or orders, would issue what were really nothing more than recommendations, but which they expected would be obeyed by their supporters. To enforce these recommendations extra-legal committees, generally backed by public opinion and sometimes concretely supported by an organized "mob," would meet in towns and counties and would be often effectively centralized where the opponents of the British policy were in control. In several of the colonies the want of orderly government became so serious that, in 1775, the Continental Congress advised them to form temporary governments until the trouble with Great Britain had been settled. When independence was declared Congress recommended to all the States that they should adopt governments of their own. In accordance with that recommendation, in the course of a very few years each State established an independent government and adopted a written constitution. It was a time when men believed in the social contract or the "compact theory of the state," that states originated through agreement, as the case might be, between king and nobles, between king and people, or among the people themselves. In support of this doctrine no less an authority than the Bible was often quoted, such a passage for example as II Samuel v, 3: "So all the elders of Israel came to the King to Hebron; and King David made a covenant with them in Hebron before the Lord; and they anointed David King over Israel." As a philosophical speculation to explain why people were governed or consented to be governed, this theory went back at least to the Greeks, and doubtless much earlier; and, though of some significance in medieval thought, it became of greater importance in British political philosophy, especially through the works of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. A very practical application of the compact theory was made in the English Revolution of 1688, when in order to avoid the embarrassment of deposing the king, the convention of the Parliament adopted the resolution: "That King James the Second, having endeavored to subvert the Constitution of the Kingdom, by breaking the original Contract between King and People, and having, by the advice of Jesuits, and other wicked persons, violated the fundamental Laws, and withdrawn himself out of this Kingdom, has abdicated the Government, and that the throne is hereby vacant." These theories were developed by Jean Jacques Rousseau in his "Contrat Social"--a book so attractively written that it eclipsed all other works upon the subject and resulted