The machinery of their government was of the simplest, and expanded, as necessity came, with their growth. As provided in the Compact, the Governor was elected yearly by general manhood suffrage. His one assistant was soon replaced by a council of seven. For eighteen years the legislative body, the General Court it is still called, was composed of the whole body of freemen; and the qualifications of a freeman were that he should be “twenty-one years of age, of sober, peaceable conversation, orthodox in religion [as a minimum, belief in God and the Bible], and should possess rateable estate to the value of twenty pounds.” By 1639 the colony had grown to require a representative form of government; and the two branches, the Governor and Council and the town representatives, sat as one body to enact laws. But save in a crisis, no law proposed at one session could be enacted until the next, so that the whole body of freemen could have opportunity to pass upon it—a clear case of the “referendum.” As early as 1623 the community had outgrown its custom of trying an offender by the whole body of citizens, and substituted trial by jury. Capital offences were six as against thirty-one in England—treason, murder, diabolical conversation, arson, rape, and unnatural crimes—and of these only two came to execution. No one was ever committed, much less punished, for “diabolical conversation.” Smoking was forbidden outdoors within a mile of a dwelling-house, or while at work in the fields: evidently there was to be no gossip over a pipe with the farmer next door. In time this law was eased; and though in the early days the clergy alluded to tobacco as the “smoke of the bottomless pit,” they soon came to use it themselves and “tobacco was set at liberty.”