Two months later,[717] a general assembly of the freemen of the colony was convened at Boston.[718] In the Assembly the charter vested the fundamental legislative authority.[719] It was the colonial Parliament. At this session more than a hundred planters were admitted to the franchises of the corporation;[720] and since this accession increased the preëxisting inconvenience of gathering the whole Company for purposes of legislation, the freemen ceded to the governor and his assistants the whole political power, reserving only the right to supply vacancies.[721] The tenure of office was unlimited;[722] perhaps it was tacitly understood to be, as in the old English law, “during good behavior”—_quamdiu se bene gesserint_. For a season the government was an elective aristocracy. It was oligarchical, like that of Venice. This endured but little more than a twelvemonth. In May, 1631, the freemen met again, “after corn was set,” and revoked a part of the authority of which they had been too lavish. The government was curbed by a reservation to the commons of the right to make such annual changes as the majority should desire.[723] “At this same time a law was established pregnant with evil, and with good. ‘To the end that the body of the commons may be preserved of honest and good men’—so runs the old text—‘it is ordered and agreed that, for the time to come, no man shall be admitted to the freedom of this body politic but such as are members of some of the churches within the corporate limit.’ This rule stood unchanged until after the Restoration. Thus was the elective franchise narrowed. The polity was a sort of theocracy; God himself, speaking through the lips of his elect, was to govern his people. An aristocracy was founded; but not on wealth, or blood, or rank. The servant, the bondman, might be a member of the church, and therefore a freeman of the Company. Other states have limited the possession of political rights to the opulent, to freeholders, to the first-born. The colonists of Massachusetts, scrupulously refusing to the clergy the least shadow of political power, established the reign of the visible church, a commonwealth of the chosen people in covenant with God.”[724] But we must not let the boldness and presumption of this act blind us to its inconsistency and its evil tendency. If men might enjoy the franchise only by uniting with the church, ambitious men, wicked men, might become hypocrites, that they might get power. When church-membership became the road to political authority, there was danger that audacious and unchastened interlopers might usurp the government, as they did in England under Whitgift, and Williams, and Laud.