From that to the declaration of rights by Virginia is apparently only a step, and yet there is a world-wide difference between the two documents. The declaration of Philadelphia is a protest, that of Virginia a law. The appeal to England's law has disappeared. The state of Virginia solemnly recognizes rights pertaining to the present and future generations as the basis and foundation of government.[107] In this and the following declarations of rights by the now sovereign states of North America, by the side of the rights of liberty that had been thus far asserted,--liberty of person, of property and of conscience,--stand new ones, corresponding to the infringements most recently suffered at England's hands of other lines of individual liberty: the right of assembly, the freedom of the press and free movement. But these rights of liberty were not the only ones therein asserted, there were the right of petition, the demand for the protection of law and the forms to be observed in insuring that, a special demand for trial by an independent jury, and in the same way with regard to other acts of the state; and the foundations of the citizen's political rights were also declared. They thus contained according to the intentions of their authors the distinctive features of the entire public right of the individual. Besides these were included the principle of the division of powers, of rotation of office, of accountability of office-holders, of forbidding hereditary titles, and there were further contained certain limitations on the legislature and executive, such as forbidding the keeping of a standing army or creating an established church,--all of which do not engender personal rights of the individual at all, or do so only indirectly. The whole is based upon the principle of the sovereignty of the people, and culminates in the conception of the entire constitution being an agreement of all concerned. In this particular one sees clearly the old Puritan-Independent idea of the covenant in its lasting influence, of which new power was to be significantly displayed later. When to-day in the separate states of the Union changes in the constitution are enacted either by the people themselves, or through a constitutional convention, there still lives in this democratic institution the same idea that once animated the settlers of Connecticut and Rhode Island. Everywhere the bill of rights forms the first part of the constitution, following which as second part comes the plan or frame of government. The right of the creator of the state, the originally free and unrestricted individual, was first established, and then the right of that which the individuals created, namely, the community.