Obviously, in adopting this rule, Massachusetts has followed what seems a correct principle. Representative government is an invention of modern times. It was unknown in antiquity. Athens was a democracy where the people met in public assembly for the government of the state: there was no representative body chosen by the people for this purpose. The public assembly was practicable in that age, as the state was small, and the assembly seldom exceeded six thousand citizens,--a large town meeting, or mass meeting, which Milton has termed “that fierce democratie.” But where the territory was extensive and the population scattered and numerous, there could be no assembly of the whole body of citizens. To meet this precise difficulty the representative system was devised. By a machinery so obvious that we are astonished it was not employed in the ancient commonwealths, the people, though scattered and numerous, are gathered, through their chosen representatives, into a small and deliberative assembly, where, without tumult or rashness, they may consider and determine all questions which concern them. In every representative body properly constituted the people are practically present. If, then, the representative body is a substitute for the people themselves meeting in primary assemblies, it would seem that it must be founded upon the people who compose the primary assemblies,--in other words, upon legal voters. Ordinarily there may be little difference between the proportion of legal voters and the proportion of population; but, strictly, the representative system is the agent of legal voters, and therefore the logic of the case is better satisfied, if it be founded on legal voters rather than on population. With me this is no new idea. On another occasion, in my own State, I asserted it. This was in a Convention for revising the Constitution of Massachusetts, as long ago as 1853. Pardon me, if I read a brief passage from a speech in that Convention, not from any importance which I attach to it, but as showing how completely at that time this rule seemed to me just.