“In 1789 Madison reported a tariff bill to the First Congress under our present Constitution. The rates of duty were left blank. Sherman, who had been chairman of a committee appointed by the General Assembly of Connecticut to supervise the coinage of copper coins under State authority,[30] took an early opportunity to propose that in filling the blanks that Madison had left, they should begin with rum, and tax it fifteen cents a gallon. He preferred, he said, to use the term cent, for its convenience, as ten made a dime, and ten dimes, a dollar.[31] This explanation was evidently necessary to make the House understand what a cent was. They approved his suggestion, and the bill when passed stated all duties in dollars and cents. It was thus that the inconvenient and senseless division of the dollar into ninetieths never afterwards obtained recognition on the statute books of the United States. “At the close of the Revolution Connecticut found herself a tributary State to her neighbors on each side. Her citizens were buying heavily from New York, Newport, and Boston importers, and thus paying duties for the benefit of New York, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. Connecticut consumed, according to an estimate by Chief Justice Ellsworth, as late as 1787, about a third of all the goods entered at the New York custom house, and paid in that way for New York customs something like twenty thousand pounds a year[32]--a vast sum for those early days. “It was thought that if New Haven were made a free port, and special encouragement offered to merchants to settle there in business, we might be able to import what we wanted for ourselves. “Our first city charter was thereupon issued, and New Haven became a city in 1784, with all the privileges of a free port for seven years. Her city seal devised by President Stiles still bears the legend, _Mare liberum_. “Roger Sherman was elected its first mayor. The charter made the term of office during good behavior, and he remained the mayor until his death. “Sherman was fond of studying problems of controversial theology. The first President Dwight, in summing up his character, described him as a ‘profound logician, statesman, lawyer, and theologian.’[33] “Religion is the philosophy of life, and theology is, or ought to be, the philosophy of religion. No thoughtful man can avoid occasional reflection on these high themes. It is our good fortune to study them in the light of sciences unknown to him. Put any doctrinal discussion of the eighteenth century by the side of those of our day, directed and controlled as ours must be by the truths of biology, the discoveries of archæologists, and the principles of evolution, and the older statements seem unreal and unsubstantial.