Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Constitutional Conflict in Provincial Massachusetts: A Study of Some Phases of the Opposition Between the Massachusetts Governor and General Court in the Early Eighteenth Century
It is necessary, first; to examine the two Opposing govern mental principles whose interaction is the key to the constitutional history of the provincial period. Three-quarters of a century of neglect by the home government had given the infant colony opportunity to develop in its own way, its form determined by the fact of organization as a corporation; but even this form was disregarded when the central purpose of the enterprise demanded the assumption of powers not usual among corporations. Under the guidance of two generations of determined, aristocratic Pur itans Massachusetts had become a theocracy, its sovereignty vested in the freemen of the Massachusetts Bay Company, whose power was concentrated, with the consent of the church members, in the hands of the rulers of the Congregational church. This Company, originally organized with an English corpora tion's powers for trade, land-holding, and colonization, had been transplanted to America, where it became merged in the colony by the admission of the prominent resident colonists to the cor poration. It gradually forsook its natural original functions, and became merely a political body, exercising as its chief reason for being the power to governe and rule,1 which had been intended to be merely incidental to the more ordinary powers of colony-planting, land-holding, and trading.
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