Virginia’s first struggle against usurping pretension was in 1624, when James I. sent out royal commissioners with orders “to enquire into the state of the plantation.” The colonists protested against the commissioners’ proposal of absolute governors, and demanded the liberty of their Assembly; “for nothing,” they said, “can conduce more to the public satisfaction and public utility.” And the Assembly succeeded in retaining its rights. Thirty years later, a domestic attempt at usurpation was met with equal firmness. Samuel Cotton, the elected governor of the colony, had a quarrel with the Assembly, and arbitrarily proclaimed it dissolved. The representative defied his authority, and speedily forced him to yield. For even in that colony in America, where existed more of the inclination to class distinction than in many other of the colonies, the same spirit of hatred to “caste,” and the exercise of any assumed superiority was deep-rooted, and thus early gave evidence of its presence. At the foundation of Virginia’s sister colony of Maryland, the king expressly covenanted that neither he nor his successors would lay any imposition, custom, or tax upon the inhabitants of the province. The proprietors had the right to establish a colonial aristocracy, but it was never exercised. “Feudal institutions,” says Bancroft, “could not be perpetuated in the lands of their origin, far less renew their youth in America. Sooner might the oldest oaks in Windsor forest be transplanted across the Atlantic, than antiquated social forms. The seeds of popular liberty, contained in the charter, would find in the New World the soil best suited to quicken them.” One of the early acts of the Provincial Assembly of Maryland was the framing of a declaration of rights. And yet, it was in Baltimore, the metropolis of the State of Maryland, that the first resistance was offered to the soldiers of the people, who were going to enforce the will of the majority upon the minority. Maryland, while, from proximity to the Federal capital, was less inclined toward the secession movement, was still sufficiently influenced by the aristocratic slave-holding part of her population as to be the scene of the first actual resistance to the will of the people in 1861. The same spirit animated the pioneers of Connecticut, where Hooker declared that “the foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people.” When John Clark and William Coddington founded the settlement of Newport, it was “unanimously agreed upon” among their people that the body politic should be “a _Democracie_ or popular government.” The colonization of Pennsylvania--“the holy experiment,” as Penn called it--was inaugurated by its great leader with a solemn pledge of “liberty of conscience and civil freedom.” And similar incidents accompanied the birth of nearly every new colony.