The truth of the matter was that the committee were chiefly Federalists. Mr. Peters was a Republican. In their answer to the petition, the committee assumed that it "was an equitable principle, that every member of the society should, in some way, contribute to the support of religious institutions and so the complaint of those who declined to support any such institution was invalid." If there was ground for complaint because of sequestration of property for the benefit of Presbyterians only, the committee failed to find any such cause, and if such existed, the proper channel of appeal was through the courts. All other complaints in the petition were considered to be answered by the assumption that the legislature had the right, on the ground of utility, to compel contributions for the support of religion, schools, and courts, whether or not every individual taxpayer had need of them. The next year, 1803, the petition gained a hearing, but that was all. It continued to be presented at every session of the Assembly, and was first heard by both houses in 1815. It was finally withdrawn at the session that passed the bill for the new constitution of 1818. As one of the preliminary steps in the education of the people in Republican principles and aims, John Strong of Norwich in 1804 founded the "True Republican," thus giving a second paper for the dissemination of Republican opinions. From 1792 the "Phenix or Windham Herald" had been dealing telling blows at the Establishment and at the courts of law through a discussion in its columns carried on by Judge Swift, the inveterate foe of the union of Church and State, and a lawyer, frank to avow that partiality existed in the administration of justice. Though both the paper and the judge were strongly Federal in their politics, they were both materially helping the Republican advocates of reform. From the Windham press came, also, a republication of "A Review of the Ecclesiastical Establishments of Europe," edited by R. Huntington, with special reference to the bearing of its arguments upon the conditions existing in Connecticut, where illustration could be found of the absurdities and dangers that the book had been originally written to expose. In 1803 John Leland, representing forty-two Baptist clergymen, twenty licensed exhorters, four thousand communicants, and twenty thousand attendants, sent out another plea for disestablishment in his "Van Tromp lowering his Peak with a Broadside, containing a Plea for the Baptists of Connecticut." In it he urges that thirteen states have already granted religious liberty, and that many of them have formed newer constitutions since the Revolution. Such should also be the case in Connecticut. Moreover, it could readily be accomplished at the small cost of five cents per man. Such a small sum would pay the expenses of a convention to formulate a constitution and another to ratify it, while five cents