It will be seen that, according to its title, the covenant was to include the people of Ireland. The manner of submitting it there has been related as follows:

"On the 4th of November, 1643, Owen O'Connolloy was sent by Parliament to the commanders in Ulster, to make preparations for administering the Covenant in Ireland. For this purpose the Rev. James Hamilton and three other clergymen came over the next spring. On the 1st of April, 1644, they presented their commissions to the Presbytery, and soon afterwards began the work of receiving signatures. The regiments took the Covenant from their own chaplains, or if they had none, from the Scottish commissioners. Major Dalzell, who was afterwards noted as a great persecutor, was the only person connected with the army who refused to swear. Then came in crowds the people near the places where the regiments were stationed. They all joined willingly, except a few Episcopal ministers and some 'profane and ungodly persons; so that there were more of the country become swearers than were men in the army.' Those who had taken the Black Oath were compelled to renounce it publicly before being admitted to the Covenant. The commissioners appointed went from town to town to preach and explain the provisions of the document they carried. Having administered it in several places in Antrim and Down where troops were stationed, they set out for the extreme North. 'From Ballymena they went with a guard of horse toward Coleraine, under one William Hume of General Leslie's regiment. They went the next day (being Thursday) to the Church, and few being present except the soldiers of the garrison, they explained the Covenant to them, and left it to their serious thoughts till the next Sabbath, being also Easter day. On this Lord's day the convention was very great from town and country. They expounded more fully the Covenant, and, among other things, told the people that their miseries had come from those sorts of people who were there sworn against, and especially from the Papists.' . . . In this manner was the Covenant taken by the people throughout the greater part of Ulster. . . . From Coleraine they went to Derry, and from Derry to the Presbyterian parts of county Donegal. . . . In Ulster the Covenant was taken by about sixteen thousand persons besides the army.”1

But these subscribers to the covenant were not the native Irish. They were really Scotchmen who, during the previous generation, had migrated across the North Channel and settled in the fertile lands of Ulster. These colonists were, as has been said of their descendants in America, "Protestants of the Protestants"-sharers in the great movement led by Knox and Melville, and they did not leave Scotland until after two of its famous covenants had been signed. Indeed their settlement in Ireland was part of a scheme "to plant the country with Protestants." In the early years of the seventeenth cen

1 Hanna, "The Scotch-Irish" (New York, 1902), I, 569, 570.

2 Roosevelt, "The Winning of the West" (New York, 1889), I, 104.

3 Hanna, "The Scotch-Irish," I, 498.

1

tury two influential Scotchmen obtained an extensive grant of land from an Ulster chief 1 and later a much larger acreage was confiscated by the English crown from rebellious Irish nobles. It was upon these lands that the Scotch immigrants were settled. Beginning with 1606 they came in large numbers, and soon succeeded in establishing a busy and prosperous colony. These were the people who subscribed to the Solemn League and Covenant in 1643, and these were the ancestors of the sturdy race which, in the succeeding century, commenced the settlement of those middle and southern colonies of America where, outside of New England, the popular ratification of constitutions began. To them this last was no new experience. It was like the renewal of a covenant, the taking of which in their ancestral home was the most impressive episode in their history.

It has been objected that the ratification of the Solemn League and Covenant was "in no sense an approval," because provision was made for enforcing subscription. It is true that in Scotland "it was ordered . . . to be sworn to and subscribed all over the kingdom on penalty of the confiscation of goods and rents and such other punishment as his majesty and the parliament should inflict on the refusers." " But in view of the enthusiasm with which the National Covenant (practically the same instrument) had been received only five years earlier, it can hardly be supposed that the enforcement of the provisions above quoted was often necessary. Of the subscription in England, Neal says: 7

"It is certain most of the religious part of the nation who apprehended the protestant religion in danger, and were desirous of reducing the hierarchy of the church, were zealous for the Covenant. Others took it only in obedience to the parliament, being sensible of the distressed circumstances of their affairs, and that the assistance of the Scots was to be obtained on no other terms."

In Ireland also "it was given only to those 'whose consciences stirred them up,'" and the historians do not seem to mention an

8

1 Hanna, "The Scotch-Irish," Chap. XXXIII.

2 Id., Chap. XXXIV.

• Hanna estimates that during the decade ending with 1618 "there must have been an immigration from Scotland of between 30,000 and 40,000." — Id. I, 504.

4 Id., 502.

-

'Borgeaud, "Rise of Modern Democracy in Old and New England" (London, 1894), 3.

• Neal, "History of the Puritans" (Parsons' Ed., London, 1811), II, 68.

7 Id. 69.

8 Hanna, "The Scotch-Irish" (New York, 1902), I, 570.

instance in any of the three countries where the common people at least were coerced into signing.

But whether everywhere voluntarily subscribed or not, the lasting result of this, as of all the covenants, was the recognition of the people as a necessary contracting party in the making of a great national compact. "The mere fact," says Borgeaud," "that the formal adhesion of the people was considered necessary, showed that the people were about to gain new rights." The requirement of their formal assent was a long step toward the doctrine that no such instrument should be valid until it should receive their actual assent.

E. "The Agreement of the People"

In the year 1648, when the Puritan movement was at its height, there was presented to the House of Commons an instrument which is declared by an eminent writer to have been "in all substantial respects a draft for an American Constitution." " Another has said:

"It was a real constitutional charter, founded on the direct acceptance of the people, and placed above the reach of the representative Assembly— a constitution in the sense in which the word is understood by the democracies of the United States and Switzerland to-day."

4

This was the famous "Agreement of the People." "

It was prob

1 "Rise of Modern Democracy in Old and New England," 30. 'Hosmer, "Life of Young Sir Henry Vane" (Boston and New York, 1888), 440. 'Borgeaud, "Rise of Modern Democracy in Old and New England" (London and New York, 1894), 43. Cf. Kidd, "Principles of Western Civilization" (New York, 1902), 106. The former also says (Id. 39): "When we read it and summarise the demands it contains we are astounded to find that it is nearly two centuries and a half old. The principles which it lays down are, for the most part, the very principles which contemporary democracy has just succeeded in establishing, or is still demanding. The sovereignty of the people; supreme power vested in a single representative assembly; the executive entrusted by the assembly to a council of state, elected for the term of one legislature; biennial parliaments; equitable and proportionate distribution of seats; extension of the right of voting and of election to all citizens dwelling in the electoral districts who are of full age, and neither hired servants nor in the receipt of relief; the toleration of all forms of Christianity; the suppression of state interference in Church government; the limitation of the powers of the representative assembly, by fundamental laws embodied in the constitution, especially with regard to the civil liberties guaranteed to citizens, these are the principles proclaimed by the English democrats in January, 1648–9.”

It is printed in full in "The Parliamentary History of England" (London, 1763), 519 et seq.; also in Gardner's "Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution" (Oxford, 1889), 270 et seq.

ably drawn by Henry Ireton, a general in the Puritan army and a son-in-law of Oliver Cromwell. But unlike its less famous successor, -the "Instrument of Government," it emanated from the rank and file and not merely from a junta of military officers. The "Agreement" and its reputed author have been thus characterized : 2

"It was one more of those Army papers from the pen of this lawyer-soldier, which strike us yet as the supreme public documents of their time for weight, insight and constructive ability. The army . . . was the nursery of all that was best in the political thought of England at that day; but probably the most definite doctrinaire, the most inventive political thinker of the formal didactic kind, in the whole Army, was Commissary-General Ireton. One knows not how far he had hitherto been shaping the opinions of his colleagues to his own, or how far he had permitted theirs, and especially Cromwell's, to shape his." Accompanying the draft of this instrument was a petition from in which the Commons were asked:

the

army

"That according to the method propounded therein, it may be tendered to the people in all parts, to be subscribed by those that are willing, as petitions and other things of a voluntary nature are, and that, in the meanwhile, the ascertaining of these circumstances, which are referred to commissioners in several counties, may be proceeded upon in a way preparatory to the practice of it; and if upon the account of subscriptions (to be returned by those commissioners in April next), there appears a general or common reception of it amongst the people, or by the well affected of them, and such as are not obnoxious for Delinquency, it may then take place and effect, according to the tenour and substance of it.'''

Here, then, we have not only a proposed written constitution but a distinct recognition of the need of its popular ratification, and a provision therefor according to the mode of adopting a covenant.

F. Vane's Proposal for a Constitutional Convention

Eight years after the "Agreement of the People" was framed, and when the Puritan party had begun to dissolve, Sir Henry Vane the Younger, who will be remembered as one of the framers of the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643, put forth a work in which

1 "A large part of both officers and the soldiers were republicans, and many adopted ultra-democratic theories.". Osgood, "The Political Ideas of the Puritans," Political Science Quarterly, VI, 219.

Masson, "The Life of Milton in Connexion with the History of his Time," IV, Others have ascribed to John Lilburne the principal share in the authorship of the "Agreement."- Foster, "Commentaries on the Constitution," 49.

IO.

3 "The Parliamentary History of England” (London, 1763), 519.

F

he thought to save political Puritanism in England from impending disaster, through a plan which appears to have included the idea of popular ratification. He proposes a new form of government and urges that "a restraint be laid upon the supreme power before it be erected, in the form of a fundamental constitution." How this was to be brought about shall be told further in his own words: —

"The most natural way for which would seem to be by general council or convention of faithful, honest, and discerning men, chosen for that purpose by the free consent of the whole body, . . . by order from the present ruling power, considered as general of the army. Which convention is not properly to exercise the legislative power, but only to debate freely and agree upon the particulars that, by way of fundamental constitutions, shall be laid and inviolably observed, as the conditions upon which the whole body so represented doth consent to cast itself into a civil and politic incorporation. Which conditions so agreed

. . . will be without danger of being broken or departed from, considering of what it is they are conditions, and the nature of the convention wherein they are made, which is of the People represented in their highest state of sovereignty, as they have the sword in their hands unsubjected unto the rules of civil government, but what themselves, orderly assembled for that purpose, do think fit to make.' '

The constitutional convention, "chosen for that purpose by the free consent of the whole body," and designed "not properly to exercise the legislative power but only to debate freely and agree upon the particulars" etc., is generally supposed to mark the acme of American constitutional development and to represent our highest contribution to political science. Professor Dicey says:

"The constitutional convention is by far the most valuable result of American inventiveness."

But here was the idea, developed and presented in almost its modern form, by this Puritan statesman of two centuries and a half ago. Truly the England of the seventeenth century seems to have been on the verge of reviving the ancient law-making privileges of its people. Had Puritanism continued in power what might not have resulted in this direction!

A survey of popular ratification in the British Isles during the period since the Reformation demonstrates clearly enough that the immediate source of it was the Calvinistic doctrine of common assent.

1 "A Healing Question Propounded and Resolved" (1656).

2 Contemporary Review, LVII, 511.