The First Constitution of New York. 43 



respect is illustrated by the fact that these two New England States 

 were content to live, one of them until 1818, and the other until 1842, 

 under charters granted by Charles the Second in 1662, while New 

 York has constantly amended and completely changed the Constitu- 

 tion she originally adopted as the best. 



Jay and his associates had no training or experience which incul- 

 cated confidence in the masses. They sought to invent an equipoise, 

 as nearly perfect as ingenuity could devise, between their fear of a 

 supreme authority and their distrust of the people. It has been 

 popular since to denounce them for their timidity. But the time has 

 not yet come when it is safe to say that their Constitution was not at 

 least as good as the one their successors have put in its place. The 

 idea of universal suffrage seems not to have occurred to this committee 

 or to the convention which ratified its work. The suffrage was not a 

 natural right but a political privilege, in their plan. They limited it 

 to the freeholders, and carefully adjusted it to a sliding scale of prop- 

 erty. Thus the possessor of a freehold of the value of twenty 

 pounds, or the tenant paying a yearly rental of forty shillings, could 

 vote for a member of assembly; but they must be ' ' possessed of a 

 freehold of the value of one hundred pounds above all debts charged 

 thereon/' to vote for a senator and the governor and lieutenant 

 governor. The voters in the latter class were as one to seven of the 

 citizens now entitled to the franchise — a most undemocratic pro- 

 portion. The pride of land was strong, and the freeholders alone 

 were thought capable of using the suffrage otherwise than to the prej- 

 udice of property. The senate was especially devised to stand 

 guardian over the landed interest. Only freeholders were eligible to 

 it, and it was a perpetual body, in the sense that the United States 

 senate is such a body. Its model was plainly the English house of 

 lords. The lower house, like the English commons, was devised as 

 the guardian of life and liberty. The members of the assembly were 

 not required to be freeholders, and so it happened that a citizen might 

 be elected to the popular branch of the legislature who was denied the 

 right of suffrage. 



These minute distinctions were clumsy and perhaps absurd, but 

 there was never a disposition in New York to nurse a hereditary aris- 

 tocracy. Virginia alone enforced a system of entails by constitutional 

 enactments, and in this solitary state, under the lead of Jefferson, the 

 provision for perpetuating hereditary aristocracy was abolished by the 

 first legislature that sat under the Constitution. From the example of 

 the Dutch patroons, New York had become a colony in which the 



