The result of the widespread hostility was the attempt at the May session of 1794 to repeal the offensive law. The Lower House did repeal it, after a lively debate, by a vote of 109 yeas to 58 nays, but the Council, or Upper House, where the conservatives were intrenched, refused to pass the bill. However, they were induced to pass a resolution suspending the sale of the lands. The debate in the House was published verbatim in the "Hartford Gazette" of May 19, 1794, and was copied by the papers throughout the state. In the following October a bill was passed by the Council, but continued over by the House and ordered to be printed in all the papers, that the people might have opportunity to consider it before it should come up to be passed upon by their representatives in the May session of 1795. [191] The terms of the bill were that the principal sum of money received from the sale of the Western Lands should be apportioned among the several school societies according to the list of polls and rateable estates, and that the interest arising from the money so divided should be appropriated to the support of schools that were kept according to the law, or to the support of the public worship of God and the Christian ministry, "as the majority of the legal voters should annually determine." [192] The proposed law was subjected to public scrutiny of all sorts. It was agitated in town meetings, and the discussions for and against it were noticed in the newspapers, where much space was given to its consideration. Ministers made it the subject of their sermons. Dr. Dwight discoursed upon the subject in his Thanksgiving sermon. [193] When the proposed bill came up before the legislature, it encountered considerable opposition, but after some modifications it became a law. As in school societies the dissenters had an equal vote, and in all town affairs were worth conciliating, there was more justice in the new law than in the old, where the ecclesiastical society was made the unit of division. From 1717 to 1793 the towns, parishes, and occasionally the ecclesiastical societies had charge of the schools. [194] But in 1794 school districts were authorized and the change to them begun. Such districts could, upon the vote of two thirds of all the qualified voters, locate schools, lay taxes to build and repair them, and appoint a collector to gather such rates. The act of May, 1795, appropriating the money from the Western Lands to the schools, provided also that the school districts should be erected into school societies to whom the money should be distributed, and by whom the interest thereon should be expended; and that it should go "to no other Use or Purpose whatsoever; except in the Case and under the circumstances hereafter mentioned." The circumstances here referred to were in cases where two thirds of the legal voters in a school society meeting, legally warned, voted to use the interest