Then the old Puritan and Independent conceptions became effective in a new direction. The theory of the social compact which played so important a role in the founding of the colonies, and had helped to establish religious liberty, now supported in the most significant way the reconstruction of existing institutions. Not that it changed these institutions, it simply gave them a new basis. The colonists had brought over the ocean with them their liberties and rights as English-born subjects. In a series of charters from the English kings it was specifically stated that the colonists and their descendants should enjoy all the rights which belonged to Englishmen in their native land.[97] Even before the English Bill of Rights the most of the colonies had enacted laws in which the ancient English liberties were gathered together.[98] There occurred, however, in the second half of the eighteenth century a great transformation in these old rights. The inherited rights and liberties, as well as the privileges of organization, which had been granted the colonists by the English kings or had been sanctioned by the colonial lords, do not indeed change in word, but they become rights which spring not from man but from God and Nature. To these ancient rights new ones were added. With the conviction that there existed a right of conscience independent of the State was found the starting-point for the determination of the inalienable rights of the individual. The theory of a Law of Nature recognized generally but one natural right of the individual--liberty or property. In the conceptions of the Americans, however, in the eighteenth century there appears a whole series of such rights. The teaching of Locke, the theories of Pufendorf[99] and the ideas of Montesquieu, all powerfully influenced the political views of the Americans of that time. But the setting forth of a complete series of universal rights of man and of citizens can in no way be explained through their influence alone. In 1764 there appeared in Boston the celebrated pamphlet of James Otis upon _The Rights of the British Colonies_. In it was brought forward the idea that the political and civil rights of the English colonists in no way rested upon a grant from the crown; even Magna Charta, old as it might be, was not the beginning of all things. "A time may come when Parliament shall declare every American charter void; but the natural, inherent, and inseparable rights of the colonists as men and as citizens would remain, and, whatever became of charters, can never be abolished till the general conflagration."[100]