In the colonial days, governors not seldom complained of the law by which members of the provincial assemblies could only be elected to sit for the towns or districts in which they actually resided. The same law once prevailed in England, but it was repealed in the time of George III., and had been disregarded in practice since the days of Elizabeth.[247:1] Under the Constitution of the United States it is, however, still necessary that a member of Congress should be a resident (or "inhabitant") of the State from which he is elected. In some States it is the law that he must reside in the particular district of the State which elects him, and custom has made this the rule in all. A candidate rejected by his own constituency, therefore, cannot stand for another; and it follows that a member who desires to continue in public life must hold the good will of his particular locality. So entirely is this accepted as a matter of course that any other system (the British system for instance) seems to the great majority of Americans quite unnatural and absurd; and it has the obvious immediate advantage that each member does more truly "represent" his particular constituents than is likely to be the case when he sits for a borough or a Division in which he may never have set foot until he began to canvas it. On the other hand, it is an obvious disadvantage that when a member for any petty local reason forfeits the good will of his own constituency, his services, no matter how valuable they may be, are permanently lost to the State. The term for which a member of the Lower House is elected in America is only two years, so that a member who has any ambition for a continuous legislative career must, almost from the day of his election, begin to consider the chance of being re-elected. As this depends altogether on his ability to hold the gratitude of his one constituency, it is inevitable that he should become more or less engrossed in the effort to serve the local needs; and a constituency, or the party leaders in a constituency, generally, indeed, measure a man's availability for re-election by what is called his "usefulness."