stration of the way in which great institutions grow. They
take shape when they express the opinions and wishes of a multitude
of persons; but it often happens that one or two men of remarkable
foresight had thought of them long beforehand.

[Footnote 4: Gardiner, _Constitutional Documents of the Puritan
Revolution_, p. lx.]

[Footnote 5: See Hosmer's _Young Sir Henry Vane_, pp.
432-444,--one of the best books ever written for the reader who wishes
to understand the state of mind among the English people in the crisis
when they laid the foundations of the United States.]

[Sidenote: The Mayflower compact(1620).]
In America the first attempts at written constitutions were in the
fullest sense made by the people, and not through representatives but
directly. In the Mayflower's cabin, before the Pilgrims had landed on
Plymouth rock, they subscribed their names to a compact in which they
agreed to constitute themselves into a "body politic," and to enact such
laws as might be deemed best for the colony they were about to
establish; and they promised "all due submission and obedience" to such
laws. Such a compact is of course too vague to be called a constitution.
Properly speaking, a written constitution is a document which defines
the character and powers of the government to which its framers are
willing to entrust themselves. Almost any kind of civil government might
have been framed under the Mayflower compact, but the document is none
the less interesting as an indication of the temper of the men who
subscribed their names to it.

[Sidenote: The "Fundamental Orders of Connecticut" (1639).]
The first written constitution known to history was that by which the
republic of Connecticut was organized in 1639. At first the affairs
of the Connecticut settlements had been directed by a commission
appointed by the General Court of Massachusetts, but on the 14th of
January, 1639, all the freemen of the three river towns--Windsor,
Hartford, and Wethersfield--assembled at Hartford, and drew up a
written constitution, consisting of eleven articles, in which the
frame of government then and there adopted was distinctly described.
This document, known as the "Fundamental Orders of Connecticut",
created the government under which the people of Connecticut lived for
nearly two centuries before they deemed it necessary to amend it. The
charter granted to Connecticut by Charles II. in 1662 was simply a
royal recognition of the gover