Though this assertion may at first sight seem too sweeping, it is borne out by the facts. During the first sessions of the Continental Congress no question was more pressing than the reorganization of the colonies should they renounce their allegiance to the crown, nor was there one in regard to which the majority of the delegates were more at sea. From, their peculiar education the New Englanders were exceptions to the general rule, and John Adams in particular had thought out the problem in all its details. His conversation so impressed some of his colleagues that he was asked to put his views in a popular form. His first attempt was a short letter to Richard Henry Lee, in November, 1775, in which he starts with this proposition as fundamental: “A legislative, an executive, and a judicial power comprehend the whole of what is meant and understood by government. It is by balancing each of these powers against the other two, that the efforts in human nature towards tyranny can alone be checked and restrained, and any degree of freedom preserved in the constitution.” [Footnote: _Works of J. Adams_, iv. 186.] His next tract, written in 1776 at the request of Wythe of Virginia, was printed and widely circulated, and similar communications were sent in reply to applications from New Jersey, North Carolina, and possibly other States. The effect of this discussion is apparent in all of the ten constitutions afterward drawn, with the exception of Pennsylvania’s, which was a failure; but none of them passed beyond the tentative or embryonic stage. It therefore remained for Massachusetts to present the model, which in its main features has not yet been superseded. A first attempt was deservedly rejected by the people, and the work was not done until 1779; but the men who then met in convention at Cambridge knew precisely what they meant to do. Though the executive and the legislature were a direct inheritance, needing but little change, a deep line was drawn between the three departments, and the theory of the coordinate judiciary was first brought to its maturity within the jurisdiction where it had been born. To attain this cherished object was the chief labor of the delegates, for to the supreme court was to be intrusted the dangerous task of grappling with the representative chambers and enforcing the popular charter. Therefore they made the tenure of the judges permanent; they secured their pay; to obtain impartiality they excluded them from political office; while on the other hand they confined the legislature within its proper sphere, to the end that the government they created might be one of laws and not of men.