138 CONNECTICUT’S INFLUENCE 
The protest of the Watertown men gave expression 
to a feeling that had many sympathizers in Dorchester 
and the New Town. For some reason these three 
towns happened to contain a considerable proportion 
of persons not fully in sympathy with the aims of 
Winthrop and Cotton and the other great leaders of 
the Puritan exodus. In the theocratic state which 
these leaders were attempting to found, one of the 
corner-stones, perhaps the chiefest corner-stone, was 
the restriction of the rights of voting and holding civil 
office to members of the Congregational Church qual- 
ified for participation in the Lord’s Supper. The 
ruling party in Massachusetts Bay believed that this 
restriction was necessary in order to guard against 
hidden foes and to assure sufficient power to the 
clergy; but there were some who felt that the restric- 
tion would give to the clergy more power than was 
likely to be wisely used, and that its tendency was 
distinctly aristocratic. The minority which held these 
democratic views was more strongly represented in 
Dorchester, Watertown, and the New Town than 
elsewhere. Here, too, the jealousy of encroachments 
upon local self-government was especially strong, as 
illustrated in the protest of Watertown above men- 
tioned. It is also a significant fact that in 1633 
to carry on the work of government by discussion. But our forefathers 
under King Alfred, a thousand years ago, were familiar with a device which 
it had never entered into the mind of Greek or Roman to conceive: they 
sent from each township a couple of esteemed men to be its representatives 
in the county court. Here was an institution that admitted of indefinite 
expansion. That old English county court is now seen to have been the 
parent of all modern popular legislatures.” [This and the succeeding 
notes are quoted from an address delivered by Dr. Fiske, October Io, 
1901, at the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Middle- 
town. ] 
