At last the winter passed, and with the summer came renewed hope. The public business had been temporarily managed by the Assistants only, and the first General Court was not held until October. At that session the charter was violated in an important point, in that the freemen relinquished their right to elect the governor and the deputy. Thereafter, it was ruled, these were to be elected by the Assistants only, with whom they were to have the power of making laws and appointing officers.[336] The extent of this limitation of the right of election, which was revoked, however, at the next General Court, is evident from the fact that in March, in contemplation of the probability of there being less than nine Assistants left in the colony, it was agreed that seven should constitute a court. In fact, the charter was continually violated in that regard, as the number of Assistants, for over fifty years, was never more than about one half of the required eighteen.[337] Footnote 336: _Massachusetts Records_, vol. I, pp. 73, 78, 79. Footnote 337: _Massachusetts Records_, vol. I, p. 84; Hutchinson, _History_, vol. I, p. 293 _n._ _Cf._ _Acts Privy Council, Colonial_, vol. I, p. 842. The Assistants, into whose hands the control of the government now passed, were probably a majority of the entire voting population of the colony. According to the terms of the charter only members of the Company, or the so-called freemen, had the right to vote at its meetings. After the “sea-change” which was presumed to have altered that document into “something rich and strange” in the way of political constitutions, those meetings became the political assemblies of the colony, and the freemen of the Company became the only enfranchised voters of the state. While two thousand persons were settled in Massachusetts about the time of that October meeting, it is probable that not more than sixteen to twenty members of the Company had crossed the ocean, of whom a number had returned or died.[338] If the charter were indeed the written constitution of a state, it was unique among such instruments in that it thus limited all political rights, in a community of two thousand persons, to a tiny self-perpetuating oligarchical group of not more than a dozen citizens. Ninety-nine and one half per cent of the population was thus unenfranchised and unrepresented, and even denied the right of appeal to the higher authorities in England. Footnote 338: Palfrey, _History_, vol. I, pp. 313, 323.