His political principles were decidedly in favor of the rights of the people. He not only displayed them, in the civil constitution of his colony, but he repeatedly stated them in his books. Such passages as the following contain his political creed: “Kings and magistrates must be considered invested with no more power than the people betrust them with.” “The sovereign power of all civil authority is founded in the consent of the people.”[389] The faults of Mr. Williams sprung, in part, from the imperfection of human nature, and in part from his temperament and the constitution of his mind. He was ardent, and his imagination was the most active of his intellectual faculties. He sometimes adopted opinions, rather by a sudden bound of the imagination, than by a regular process of reasoning. His ardor, and his conscientious and fearless love of truth, impelled him to act on his opinions, with a degree of energy and firmness which exposed him to the charge of obstinacy. Such a man will occasionally fall into error, and into rapid transitions, which will give to his conduct the appearance of inconsistency. This was the case with Mr. Williams, in some of his actions, but the inconsistency never affected his great principles. These he never abandoned for a moment. His course was steadily onward, like that of a planet, though disturbing causes occasionally produced slight eccentricities. In his domestic relations, he seems to have been amiable and happy. His expressions of attachment to his family prove the strength of his conjugal and parental affection. His children grew up to maturity. A numerous posterity have arisen to bless his memory, and to feel pleasure in the contemplation of his character and the diffusion of his fame. He is dead, but his principles survive, and are destined to spread over the earth. The State which he founded is his monument.[390] Her sons, when asked for a record of Roger Williams, may point to her history, unstained by a single act of persecution; to her prosperity, her perfect freedom, her tranquil happiness, and may reply, in the spirit of the epitaph on the tomb of Sir Christopher Wren, in St. Paul’s Cathedral, “_look around!_” “Si monumentum quæris, circumspice.” APPENDIX. NOTE A. p. 23. On the subject of the relationship between Cromwell and Roger Williams, an obliging antiquarian friend says: “As to the relationship between Mr. Williams and Oliver Cromwell, I can only say, that it was quite remote, if it existed at all. In the London Review, for March, 1772, is a genealogy of the Cromwell family. As you may not have seen this account, and as it may interest you, I will give you an abridgment of it, that you may see how near related he was to the Protector.