forcibly expressed by the
great Tory historian Hutchinson, who tells us that in the year 1619 a
house of burgesses _broke out_ in Virginia! as if it had been the
mumps, or original sin, or any of those things that people cannot help
having.

[Sidenote: The governor's council was a kind of upper house.]
This representative assembly was the lower house in the colonial
legislatures. The governor always had a council to advise with him and
assist him in his executive duties, in imitation of the king's privy
council in England. But in nearly all the colonies this council took
part in the work of legislation, and thus sat as an upper house, with
more or less power of reviewing and amending the acts of the assembly.
In Pennsylvania, as already observed, the council refrained from this
legislative work, and so, until some years after the Revolution, the
Pennsylvania legislature was one-chambered. The members of the council
were appointed in different ways, sometimes by the king or the lord
proprietary, or, as in Massachusetts, by the outgoing legislature, or,
as in Connecticut, they were elected by the people.

[Sidenote: The colonial government was like the English system in
miniature.]
Thus all the colonies had a government framed after the model to which
the people had been accustomed in England. It was like the English
system in miniature, the governor answering to the king, and the
legislature, usually two-chambered, answering to parliament. And as
quarrels between king and parliament were not uncommon, so quarrels
between governor and legislature were very frequent indeed, except
in Connecticut and Rhode Island. The royal governors, representing
British imperial ideas rather than American ideas, were sure to come
into conflict with the popular assemblies, and sometimes became
the objects of bitter popular hatred. The disputes were apt to be
concerned with questions in which taxation was involved, such as
the salaries of crown officers, the appropriations for war with
the Indians, and so on. Such disputes bred more or less popular
discontent, but the struggle did not become flagrant so long as the
British parliament refrained from meddling with it.

[Sidenote: The Americans never admitted the supremacy of parliament;]
The Americans never regarded parliament as possessing any rightful
authority over their internal affairs. When the earliest colonies were
founded, it was the general theory that the American wilderne