New York, in her Constitution of 1777, pursued a somewhat similar plan. Her highest court was one "for the trials of impeachments and the correction of errors." Its members were the Senate with the Chancellor and judges of the Supreme Court. When a judgment of that court was brought up for review the judges were to state their reasons for giving it, but had no vote. This scheme was adhered to with little modification until 1846. What made it tolerable was that many of those elected Senators were naturally lawyers, and that to be in the Senate soon became the ambition of a lawyer with any desire to know how it would feel to be a judge. Able and learned opinions were pronounced by such men in exercising their judicial functions, and some of them in the New York reports are still frequently the subject of reference as clear and satisfactory statements of legal principles. Connecticut, in 1784, when she instituted for the first time a court of last resort, made it up of the Lieutenant Governor and the twelve Assistants, and soon added to it the Governor himself. A plan of this kind was likely to work in that State, as in New York, better than it looked. Lawyers by this time had come to fill most of the higher offices of state. Although the Assistants were elected annually it was under a complicated scheme of nomination, which, unless in case of a political revolution, ensured re-election in every case. A majority of the Assistants were always members of the bar. They were also Federalists from the beginning of party divisions in the country. Naturally, the Republicans found such a state of things intolerable. All the power of government in Connecticut, said one of those who were celebrating Jefferson's second election to the Presidency in 1804, "together with a complete control of elections, are in the hands of seven lawyers who have gained a seat at the council board. These seven men virtually make and repeal laws as they please, appoint all the Judges, plead before those Judges, and constitute themselves a Supreme Court of Errors to decide in the last resort on the laws of their own making. To crown this absurdity, they have repealed a law which prohibited them to plead before the very court of which they are Judges." Attacks like this were too just to be resisted, and two years later the Governor, Lieutenant-Governor and Assistants were replaced by the Judges of the Superior Court.