60 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The free involution of a legislature from below is naturally more 

 rapid than its reluctant devolution from above. The swift develop- 

 ment of the Massachusetts Company into the Massachusetts Legisla- 

 ture has been ably traced by Professor Fiske, who is a sociologist 

 as well as a historian. The attempt to transact public business at a 

 primary meeting of all the freemen in the colony, assembling four 

 times a year, repeats the old Witenagemot, and failed for the same 

 reason as that died out — because, from the expansion of the popula- 

 tion, the assemblage was impracticable. It needed only four years 

 for the freemen to acquire the right of sending deputies to the 

 General Court, and only fifteen to bring about a permanent division 

 into two Houses. Other early colonies passed through the same 

 stages; colonies of later foundation took up the development at the 

 bicameral stage. It is the history of a land and colonization com- 

 pany of those days, or of a railway company in ours. The directors 

 become a Senate and the body of shareholders the popular House; the 

 statutes of the company are its constitution and the by-laws its legis- 

 lation. The origin of charter legislatures in a company explains a 

 parallel anomaly to that in crown legislatures. While the repre- 

 sentative Houses in British colonial legislatures have followed the 

 House of Commons in gathering all power into their own hands, in 

 states descended from the charter companies the House of Repre- 

 sentatives has been losing, while the Senate has gained authority. 

 In both cases the apparent anomaly is the outcrop of a deeper law. 

 The ministry in the one case and the senate in the other are each 

 the embodiment of that continuous social gerrn-plasm to which 

 the popular will of the hour stands in the same relation as the in- 

 dividual life does to the physiological germ-plasm; and, as the 

 latter is the true substance of the body, the social germ-plasm is 

 the substance of society, incarnating its permanent interests, and 

 therefore justly overriding the cries, the whims, the passions of 

 the hour. 



The same dichotomy is visible in the colonial judicature. The 

 paterfamilias, the village elder, the tribal chief, the king, possess 

 and personally exercise an undelegated jurisdiction. Fully twenty 

 years ago a sociological worker surprised a historian of some pre- 

 tensions, who was conversant with the mere events of his special 

 period, by informing him that the practice of English kings to pre- 

 side in their own courts of justice came as far down as that very 

 period — the reign of James I. This prerogative was transmitted 

 with the other attributes of royalty to the governors of crown 

 colonies, who " generally acted as judges, sitting in the highest 

 court." A New Jersey Cincinnatus revived primitive simplicities 

 by hearing causes seated on a tree stump in his fields. The succes- 



