sending representatives to the General Assembly, what should be borne in mind is, that the bodies so doing, called towns, were little nuclei, little corporations, holding their sessions in kitchens and taverns; narrow, self-centred, and dictatorial each, through the circumstances of its origin, a protest against external authority; and each, by forcing the General Assembly (no less than the General Court of Trials) to attend upon its convenience, so impregnating the future with particularism that to-day the Rhode Island Legislature meets every year at Newport to choose a vetoless Governor before convening at Providence for legislative business.1 However, even in the case of the towns as land companies, the principle of modification was early at work, for, on the outside of each of these nuclei, there was an ever-increasing parisitical aggregation, in the form of non-proprietary inhabitants (beisassen, or denizens, they are called in Appenzell, where of late they have broken down and absorbed the Rhoden as political units), and this aggregation of course found the line of its interests largely apart from, and in opposition to, that of the interests of the nucleus, or corporation, to which it was attached. But the most salient point in the relation of State to town in early Rhode Island remains to be considered. This point is that our tiny commonwealth, in the relation mentioned, prefigured more completely than any of its associates what (in gen 1 Written before the transfer of the seat of government wholly to Providence. eral acceptation) was the course of the American Union down to the Civil War. That is to say it began as a group of separate sovereignties, each highly centrifugal in tendency; these, under grinding necessity, were at length led reluctantly to unite; the union was precarious, and resulted in the resumption by certain of the sovereignties of their original independence; this resumption in turn was abandoned for closer union; the union thus formed was held by a large element to be dissoluble in the same way as, afterwards, the American Union was held to be dissoluble in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, or by the eleven States that formed the Southern Confederacy.1 It is true that for a full realization of the force of the above parallel there should be taken into account the act of the Rhode Island General Assembly in 1686, under Governor Andros, in voting that it should be "lawful for the freemen of each town to meet together" and make all necessary provision "for managing the affairs of their respective towns"; also the act of the town of Scituate, in 1777, declaring that upon the promulgation of the Declaration of Independence all authority reverted to the people as originally organized. But none the less the parallel is one sufficiently striking To those disposed to view with favor the opinion of Mr. John C. Hurd and Mr. John C. Ropes (Theory of our National Existence, 1881, and The Union State, 1890, both by Mr. Hurd), that the colonies at no time were separate sovereignties, the question of the status of the Rhode Island plantations, prior to 1644-47, is one of exceeding interest. See paper in Harvard Law Review for January, 1901, entitled: From John Austin to John C. Hurd." in the period between the date of origin of Providence, Portsmouth, Newport, and Warwick, and that of the coalescence of these communities under Roger Williams after the coup d'état of Coddington. Nor should it be overlooked that interesting national institutions are dimly prefigured in the early Rhode Island Presidential office; also in the Supreme Court of Trials with its jurisdiction in controversies between different towns, or the citizens of such towns, or between citizens of a Rhode Island town and citizens of a foreign colony or State. Indeed, it is because of these varied prefigurings that Mr. George Bancroft is led to say that "more ideas which have become national have emanated from the little colony of Rhode Island than from any other"; and it is equally because of them that it has been deemed fitting here to devote a special chapter to that early particularism and separatism, the outgrowth of individualism,1-of which these ideas were the manifestation. 1 Apropos of democracy as the outcome of individualism, it is worthy of remark that while individualism may be said to import democracy, the inference is by no means warranted that democracy imports individualism. The colony of Connecticut, for example, was markedly democratic, but it was also markedly void of individualism. And if we turn to the most noted of the democracies of antiquity-Athens-we find even less of individualism than in Connecticut. Indeed, between the city-State of the Greeks and the town-State of early Rhode Island there is a difference consisting largely in the fact, that whereas in the former the individual lived for the State, in the latter the State lived for the individual. This it is that makes any comparison of early Rhode Island with the democracies of antiquity less suggestive than comparisons with the older Swiss cantons where individualism was a feature not only distinguishing but aggressive. |