of ships had brought from England to Massachusetts more than 3000 souls, and so great an accession made further movement easy.  Hooker’s pilgrims were soon followed by the Dorchester and Watertown congregations, and by the next May 800 people were living in Windsor, Hartford, and Wethersfield.  As we read of these movements, not of individuals, but of organic communities, united in allegiance to a church and its pastor, and fervid with the instinct of self-government, we seem to see Greek history renewed, but with centuries of added political training.  For one year a board of commissioners from Massachusetts governed the new towns, but at the end of that time the towns chose representatives and held a General Court at Hartford, and thus the separate existence of Connecticut was begun.  As for Springfield, which was settled about the same time by a party from Roxbury, it remained for some years doubtful to which state it belonged.  At the opening session of the General Court, May 31,1638, Mr. Hooker preached a sermon of wonderful power, in which he maintained that “the foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people,” “that the choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people by God’s own allowance,” and that “they who have power to appoint officers and magistrates have the right also to set the bounds and limitations of the power and place unto which they call them.”  On the 14th of January, 1639, all the freemen of the three towns assembled at Hartford and adopted a written constitution in which the hand of the great preacher is clearly discernible.  It is worthy of note that this document contains none of the conventional references to a “dread sovereign” or a “gracious king,” nor the slightest allusion to the British or any other government outside of Connecticut itself, nor does it prescribe any condition of church-membership for the right of suffrage.  It was the first written constitution known to history, that created a government, [10] and it marked the beginnings of American democracy, of which Thomas Hooker deserves more than any other man to be called the father.  The government of the United States today is in lineal descent more nearly related to that of Connecticut than to that of any of the other thirteen colonies.  The most noteworthy feature of the Connecticut republic was that it was a federation of independent towns, and that all attributes of sovereignty not expressly granted to the General Court remained, as of original right, in the towns.  Moreover, while the governor and council were chosen by a majority vote of the whole people, and by a suffrage that was almost universal, there was for each township an equality of representation in the assembly. [11] This little federal republic was allowed to develop peacefully and normally; its constitution was not violently wrenched out of shape like that of Massachusetts at the end of the seventeenth century.  It silently grew till it became the strongest political structure