blamed them--let
us, without bigotry, try if we cannot look at them through a medium that
shall render them to us in all their essential characteristics as they
were. That medium is afforded us by the written constitution that they
made of their own free will for their own government. This is said to
give the best portrait of any people; though in a nation that has been
long maturing, the compromise between the past and present, written upon
almost every page of its history, cannot have failed in some degree to
make the likeness dim. Yet, of such a people as we are describing, who
may be said to have no past, who live not so much in the present as in
the future, and who forge as with one stroke the constitution that is to
be a basis of their laws--are we not provided with a mirror that
reflects every lineament with the true disposition of light and shade?
If it is a stern, it is yet a truthful, mirror. It flatters neither
those who made it nor those blear-eyed maskers, who, forgetful of their
own distorted visages, look in askance, and are able to see nothing to
admire in the sober, bright-eyed faces of their fathers who gaze down
upon them from the olden time.

The preamble of this constitution begins by reciting the fact that its
authors are, "under Almighty God, inhabitants and residents of Windsor,
Hartford, and Wethersfield, upon the river of Connecticut." It also
states that, in consonance with the word of God, in order to maintain
the peace and union of such a people, it is necessary that "there should
be an orderly and decent government established," that shall "dispose
of the affairs of _the people_ at all seasons." "We do therefore," say
they, "associate and conjoin ourselves to be as one public state or
commonwealth." They add, further, that the first object aimed at by them
is to preserve the liberty and the purity of the gospel and the
discipline of their own churches; and, in the second place, to govern
their _civil affairs_ by such rules as their written constitution and
the laws enacted under its authority shall prescribe. To provide for
these two objects--the liberty of the Gospel, as they understood it, and
the regulation of their own civil affairs, they sought to embody in the
form of distinct decrees, substantially the following provisions:

1. That there shall be every year two general assemblies or courts, one
on the second Thursday of April, the other on the second Thursday of
September; that th