The governor was chosen annually, by general suffrage,[314] as were also the councillors.[315] The name of the man who was disposed to shirk his civil duty we do not know; “but a curious law was passed in 1632, that whoever should refuse the office of governor, being chosen thereto, should pay twenty pounds; and that of magistrate, ten pounds. Very singular, certainly; and we may suppose that that race has run out even in Massachusetts.”[316] The legislative body was at first composed of the whole company of voters.[317] Then, when their numbers grew, church-membership was made the test of citizenship[318]—a test which endured till 1665, when it was reluctantly yielded at the requisition of the king’s commissioners.[319] It was not until 1669 that the increase of population warranted the establishment of a House of Representatives.[320] “Narrow as the restriction of citizenship to church-members was, it is easy to explain it by remembering that toleration, in any large sense, was hardly entertained by the most liberal religionists in that twilight age, and that the one idea which inspired this emigration and nerved these men for the bitterest sacrifices was, that they and their children might be free from an ecclesiastical tyranny which, if it followed, would endanger them. It should also be borne in mind that the history they studied, and the guide they felt bound to follow, was the Jewish theocracy, ordained by God, as they doubted not, to be a model in church and state for all time; and that, under that dispensation, death was the punishment for smaller errors than dissent. These facts explain and palliate the religious precision and severity afterwards practised in New England. But the free idea with which they started gradually grew broader, overcame the evil customs of the time, and strangled the prejudices of the Pilgrims themselves.”[321] So early as the 17th of December, 1623, it was decreed that “all criminal facts, and all manner of trespass and debt betwixt man and man, should be tried by the verdict of twelve honest men.”[322] Thus the jury trial, the distinctive badge of Saxon civilization, a right which a long line of able lawyers, from Coke and Hale to Mansfield and Erskine, have united in styling the palladium of civil liberty, was planted in America.