repugnant to the established forms of plantation government. It is a striking fact that this assertion of the right of the people to participate in their own government, which is now the key to our entire political superstructure, should have been first made in the year 1683, in New-York. It was probably the first great public assertion of the right of popular government in all history. This is one of the pleasant heritages of our State.

The accession of King James II. merged his estate in the province in that of the crown. The franchises, liberties, and jurisdiction of a proprietary government, when they came to be in the hands of him who had the crown and jurisdiction royal, devolved on the crown, and were thenceforth determined by the law governing the royal prerogatives. As Duke of York, James was no longer seized of the province in his natural capacity, but in some manner the province was annexed to his English crown and went with it. New-York now became a crown government, or one in which the crown asserted that it had the entire control of legislation, while the administration was by public officers controlled by the king. The "Charter of Libertys" being still probationary or not confirmed, the province, at the time of King James's accession, was in no respect a chartered province, and, therefore, by the contemporary law governing the prerogatives of the crown, the inhabitants of the newly made crown province had as yet no strict legal right to participate in their own government. It was otherwise in a chartered colony, or in a crown dependency, when representative government had been once allowed.

In the second year of his reign King James II. issued a new and much fuller commission to Governor Dongan, which was, as usual, accompanied by formal instructions, dated May 29, 1686.1 They finally rejected the "Charter of Libertys," but confirmed all those laws of the Assembly which had been previously allowed. By the new instruments the entire legislative power was restored to the Governor and Council of the province, subject to the veto of the crown. The legal right of the crown to take away an Assembly allowed by the lord proprietor presented a novel question, but one which James II. determined for himself. Had he been king when he granted the Assembly, the grant would have been irrevocable. The constitution of the province was now determined only by the common law relative to the prerogative, and no longer by the duke's patent, and it found its chief expression in the Governor's commission and instructions. The new instructions were in many respects less liberal than those which they superseded. They, however, again declared that all laws enacted by the Governor and Council were to be as nearly as convenient "agreeable to the laws and statutes of England." Appeals in civil cases involving upward

1 Doc. rel. Col. Hist. N. Y., 3: 369.