d reason to know, very truly,
that this action of the Convention was taken in consequence
of a quarrel in Court between the late Judge Merrick and General
Butler and Mr. Josiah G. Abbott, two eminent leaders of
the Democrats, members of the Convention. They had neither
of them agreed to the proposition to change the judicial tenure.
They were absent from the convention for several days in
the trial of an important cause before Merrick, and returned
angry with the Judge and determined to do something to curb
the independent power of the Judges. The proposition was
adopted.

These schemes were a distinct violation of the pledge which
had been given when the Legislature submitted to the people
the proposition for calling the Convention. Of course it
was a fair answer to this complaint to say that the members
of the committee who made that report could in such a matter
bind nobody but themselves. That was true. But I think if
the men who signed that report, and the men who joined them
in giving the assurance to the people, had been earnest and
zealous in the matter it is quite likely they could have prevented
the action of the Convention.

The scheme for a new constitution passed the Convention by
a large majority and was submitted to the people. The Whig
leaders, who seemed to have had all their wisdom and energy
taken out of them when the Free Soilers left them, were much
alarmed by the strength of the discontent with the existing
order of things manifested by the coalition victory in the
election of the Constitutional Convention. Many of them concluded
that it would be unwise to resist the popular feeling. One
Saturday afternoon during that summer I was in the office
of Francis Wayland, a great friend of mine, long Dean of the
New Haven Law School, when Henry S. Washburn, a member of
the Whig State Central Committee, came into Wayland's office
and told me he had just attended a meeting of the Committee
that day and that it determined to make no contest against
the new Constitution. The Springfield _Republican,_ then
a Whig journal, had an article that day, or the following
Monday, to the same effect. I was very much disturbed. I
hurried to Concord by the first train Monday morning, and
saw my brother, who was then a Judge of the Court of Common
Pleas. He agreed with me in thinking that the proposed scheme
of government a very bad one. He went at once to Cambridge
and saw John G. Palfrey, a very able a