In the year 1775, under the British law, the Parliament at Westminster claimed the unqualified right to determine in what matters and to what extent laws should be made which would interfere with individual freedom. From such decision of the legislative part of the British Government there was no appeal save by force or revolution. For this reason, that every human being under that Government must submit to any interference with individual freedom commanded by that Legislature, all British human beings were “subjects.” And, as all Americans were then under that British Government, all Americans were then “subjects.” Such was their legal status under the so-called British Constitution. Curiously enough, however, until a comparatively short time prior to 1775, such had _not_ been the _actual_ status of the Americans. In this sharp contrast between their legal and their actual status, there will be found both the cause of their Revolution and the source of their great and accurate knowledge of the sound principles of republican government which they later made the fundamental law of America. From the day their ancestors had first been British colonists in America their legal status had been that of subjects of the British Government. But, so long as they remained merely a few widely scattered sets of human beings in a new world, struggling to get a bare existence from day to day, they offered no temptation to the omnipotent British Government to oppress them, its subjects. They still had to show the signs of acquiring that community wealth which has always been the temptation of government to unjust exaction from the human beings it governs. For that reason, their legal government concerned itself very little about them or their welfare. It thus became their necessity to govern themselves for all the purposes for which they locally needed government as security to their individual welfare. Only thirteen years after the first permanent English settlement in Virginia, “Sir George Yeardley, then the Governor of the colony, in 1619 called a general assembly, composed of representatives from the various plantations in the colony, and permitted them to assume and exercise the high functions of legislation. Thus was formed and established the first representative legislature that ever sat in America. And this example of a domestic parliament, to regulate all the internal concerns of the country, was never lost sight of, but was ever afterwards cherished [until 1917] throughout America, as the dearest birthright of freemen.” (1 _Ell. Deb._ 22.)