Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 54.djvu/68

60 The free involution of a legislature from below is naturally more rapid than its reluctant devolution from above. The swift development of the Massachusetts Company into the Massachusetts Legislature has been ably traced by Professor Fiske, who is a sociologist as well as a historian. The attempt to transact public business at a primary meeting of all the freemen in the colony, assembling four times a year, repeats the old Witenagemot, and failed for the same reason as that died out—because, from the expansion of the population, the assemblage was impracticable. It needed only four years for the freemen to acquire the right of sending deputies to the General Court, and only fifteen to bring about a permanent division into two Houses. Other early colonies passed through the same stages; colonies of later foundation took up the development at the bicameral stage. It is the history of a land and colonization company of those days, or of a railway company in ours. The directors become a Senate and the body of shareholders the popular House; the statutes of the company are its constitution and the by-laws its legislation. The origin of charter legislatures in a company explains a parallel anomaly to that in crown legislatures. While the representative Houses in British colonial legislatures have followed the House of Commons in gathering all power into their own hands, in states descended from the charter companies the House of Representatives has been losing, while the Senate has gained authority. In both cases the apparent anomaly is the outcrop of a deeper law. The ministry in the one case and the senate in the other are each the embodiment of that continuous social germ-plasm to which the popular will of the hour stands in the same relation as the individual life does to the physiological germ-plasm; and, as the latter is the true substance of the body, the social germ-plasm is the substance of society, incarnating its permanent interests, and therefore justly overriding the cries, the whims, the passions of the hour.

The same dichotomy is visible in the colonial judicature. The paterfamilias, the village elder, the tribal chief, the king, possess and personally exercise an undelegated jurisdiction. Fully twenty years ago a sociological worker surprised a historian of some pretensions, who was conversant with the mere events of his special period, by informing him that the practice of English kings to preside in their own courts of justice came as far down as that very period—the reign of James I. This prerogative was transmitted with the other attributes of royalty to the governors of crown colonies, who "generally acted as judges, sitting in the highest court." A New Jersey Cincinnatus revived primitive simplicities by hearing causes seated on a tree stump in his fields. The