On the 14th of January, 1639, the freemen of the three towns, Windsor, Hartford, and Wethersfield, assembled at Hartford, and drew up a constitution, consisting of eleven articles, which they called the “Fundamental Orders of Connecticut,” and under this law the people of Connecticut lived for nearly two centuries, as the Charter granted by King Charles II., in 1662, was simply a royal recognition of the government actually in operation. Another writer says: “We honor the limitations of despotism which are written in the twelve tables; the repression of monarchical power in Magna Charta, in the Bill of Rights, and [Illustration: MAIN STREET.] in that whole undefinable creation, as invisible and intangible as the atmosphere but like it full of oxygen and electricity, which we call the British Constitution. But in our Connecticut Constitution we find no limitation upon monarchy, for monarchy is unrecognized; the limitations are upon the legislature, the courts, and executive. It is pure democracy acting through representation, and imposing organic limitations. Even the suffrage qualification of church membership, which was required by our older sister Colony of Massachusetts, was omitted. Here in a New England wilderness a few pilgrims of the pilgrims, alive to the inspirations of the common law and of the British Constitution, so full of Christianity that they felt the great throb of its heart of human brotherhood, and so full of Judaism that they believed themselves in some special sense the people of God, made a written constitution, to be a supreme and organic law for their State.” But for the immediate inspiration of this document we must look to a “lecture,” preached by Mr. Hooker on Thursday, May 21, 1638, before the legislative body of freemen. Dr. Bacon says of it: “That sermon, by Thomas Hooker, is the earliest known suggestion of a fundamental law, enacted, not by royal charter nor by concession from any previously existing government, but by the people themselves,--a primary and supreme law by which the government is constituted, and which not only provides for the free choice of magistrates by the people, but also sets the bounds and limitations of the power and place to which each magistrate is called.”