136 CONNECTICUT’S INFLUENCE 
by works. These examples have prepared us to under- 
stand the case of Connecticut. The secession which 
gave rise to Connecticut was attended by no such 
stormy scenes as were witnessed at the banishment of 
Wheelwright and Mrs. Hutchinson, yet it included a 
greater number of elements of historic significance and 
was in many ways the most important and remarkable 
of the instances of segmentation which occurred in 
early New England. 
When the charter of the Massachusetts Company was 
brought to the western shore of the Atlantic, the mere 
fact of separation from England sufficed to transmute 
the commercial corporation into a self-governing re- 
public. The company had its governor, its deputy- 
governor, and its council of eighteen assistants, as 
was commonly the case with commercial joint-stock 
companies. In London this governing board would 
have exercised almost autocratic control over the 
transactions of the company, although politically it 
would have remained a body unknown to law, how- 
ever much influence it might have exerted. But on 
American soil the company at once became a political 
body, and its governor, deputy-governor, and assistants 
became the ruling head of a small republic consisting 
of the company’s settlers in Salem, Charlestown, Boston, 
Roxbury, Dorchester, Watertown, and a little group of 
houses halfway between Watertown and Boston and 
known for a while simply as the New Town. This 
designation indicated its comparative youth; it was 
about a year younger than its sister towns! Nothing 
was said in the charter about a popular representative 
assembly, and at first the government did not feel the 
need of one. They were men of strong characters, 
