because the founders of the American colonies were Englishmen used from time immemorial to tax themselves and govern themselves.  As they had been wont to vote for representatives in England, instead of leaving things to be controlled by the king, so now they voted for representatives in Maryland or New York, instead of leaving things to be controlled by the governor.  The spontaneousness of all this is quaintly and forcibly expressed by the great Tory historian Hutchinson, who tells us that in the year 1619 a house of burgesses broke out in Virginia! as if it had been the mumps, or original sin, or any of those things that people cannot help having.

[Sidenote:  The governor’s council was a kind of upper house.] This representative assembly was the lower house in the colonial legislatures.  The governor always had a council to advise with him and assist him in his executive duties, in imitation of the king’s privy council in England.  But in nearly all the colonies this council took part in the work of legislation, and thus sat as an upper house, with more or less power of reviewing and amending the acts of the assembly.  In Pennsylvania, as already observed, the council refrained from this legislative work, and so, until some years after the Revolution, the Pennsylvania legislature was one-chambered.  The members of the council were appointed in different ways, sometimes by the king or the lord proprietary, or, as in Massachusetts, by the outgoing legislature, or, as in Connecticut, they were elected by the people.

[Sidenote:  The colonial government was like the English system in miniature.] Thus all the colonies had a government framed after the model to which the people had been accustomed in England.  It was like the English system in miniature, the governor answering to the king, and the legislature, usually two-chambered, answering to parliament.  And as quarrels between king and parliament were not uncommon, so quarrels between governor and legislature were very frequent indeed, except in Connecticut and Rhode Island.  The royal governors, representing British imperial ideas rather than American ideas, were sure to come into conflict with the popular assemblies, and sometimes became the objects of bitter popular hatred.  The disputes were apt to be concerned with questions in which taxation was involved, such as the salaries of crown officers, the appropriations for war with the Indians, and so on.  Such disputes bred more or less popular discontent, but the struggle did not become flagrant so long as the British parliament refrained from meddling with it.