They are not only repeating, they are anticipating, the history of the parent state. Female suffrage has been conceded in two Australasian colonies, and it is inevitable in the rest. The domination of a socialist democracy is far advanced in the two former. The referendum, or direct appeal to the people on specific issues, is on the eve of general enactment. Ministries elected by the legislature are possibly in the near future. Thus legislative bodies which sprang from the crown are more democratic than those that sprang from the people. Withal, the former retain an anomalous vestige of their origin. While the business of legislation in Congress is necessarily conducted by members who have no official connection with the executive, as it was originally in the English Parliament, the British and colonial ministries claim an ever-increasing monopoly of legislation on all questions of any magnitude. It has long been recognized as impossible for a private member to carry through the House of Commons a measure of any consequence, and a colonial ministry arrests the progress of a successful bill by intimating that the subject of it can only be legislated upon by the Government. 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