But every revolutionary proceeding is to be avoided. It is within the recollection of all familiar with our history, that our fathers, while regulating the separation of the Colonies from the parent country, were careful that all should be done according to forms of law, so that _the thread of legality_ should continue unbroken. To this end the Continental Congress interfered by supervising direction. But the Tory argument denied the power of Congress then as earnestly as now. Mr. Duane, of the Continental Congress, made himself its mouthpiece. “_Congress ought not to determine a point of this sort, about instituting government._ What is it to Congress how justice is administered? You have no right to pass the resolution, any more than Parliament has. How does it appear that no favorable answer is likely to be given to our petitions?”[203] In spite of this argument, the Congress of that day undertook, by formal resolutions, to indicate the process by which the new governments should be constituted.[204] If we seek for the principle which entered into this proceeding of the Continental Congress, we find it in the idea that nothing can be left to illegal or informal action, but that all must be done according to rules of constitution and law previously ordained. Perhaps this principle has never been more distinctly or powerfully enunciated than by Mr. Webster, in his speech against the Dorr Constitution in Rhode Island. According to him, this principle is a fundamental part of what he calls our American system, under which the right of suffrage is prescribed by _previous law_, including its qualifications, the time and place of its exercise, and the manner of its exercise; and then, again, the results are certified to the central power by some certain rule, _by some known public officers_, in some clear and definite form, thus accomplishing two things: first, that every man entitled to vote may vote; secondly, that his vote may be sent forward and counted, so that practically he may exercise his part of sovereignty in common with his fellow-citizens. Such, according to Mr. Webster, are minute forms which must be followed, if we would impart to the result the crowning character of law. And here are other positive words from him on this important point. “We are not to take the will of the people from public meetings, nor from tumultuous assemblies, by which the timid are terrified, the prudent are alarmed, and by which society is disturbed. These are not American modes of signifying the will of the people, and they never were.”