imagined every thing republican which was not monarchy.  We had not yet penetrated to the mother principle, that ’governments are republican only in proportion as they embody the will of their people, and execute it.’  Hence, our first constitutions had really no leading principle in them.  But experience and reflection have but more and more confirmed me in the particular importance of the equal representation then proposed.  On that point, then, I am entirely in sentiment with your letters; and only lament that a copyright of your pamphlet prevents their appearance in the newspapers, where alone they would be generally read, and produce general effect.  The present vacancy too, of other matter, would give them place in every paper, and bring the question home to every man’s conscience.

But inequality of representation in both Houses of our legislature, is not the only republican heresy in this first essay of our revolutionary patriots at forming a constitution.  For let it be agreed that a government is republican in proportion as every member composing it has his equal voice in the direction of its concerns, (not indeed in person, which would be impracticable beyond the limits of a city, or small township, but) by representatives chosen by himself, and responsible to him at short periods, and let us bring to the test of this canon every branch of our constitution.

In the legislature, the House of Representatives is chosen by less than half the people, and not at all in proportion to those who do choose.  The Senate are still more disproportionate, and for long terms of irresponsibility.  In the Executive, the Governor is entirely independent of the choice of the people, and of their control; his Council equally so, and at best but a fifth wheel to a wagon.  In the Judiciary, the judges of the highest courts are dependent on none but themselves.  In England, where judges were named and removable at the will of an hereditary executive, from which branch most misrule was feared, and has flowed, it was a great point gained, by fixing them for life, to make them independent of that executive.  But in a government founded on the public will, this principle operates in an opposite direction, and against that will.  There, too, they were still removable on a concurrence of the executive and legislative branches.  But we have made them independent of the nation itself.  They are irremovable, but by their own body, for any depravities of conduct, and even by their own body for the imbecilities of dotage.  The justices of the inferior courts are self-chosen, are for life, and perpetuate their own body in succession for ever, so that a faction once possessing themselves of the bench of a county, can never be broken up, but hold their county in chains, for ever indissoluble.  Yet these justices are the real executive as well as judiciary, in all our minor and most ordinary concerns.  They tax us at will; fill the office of sheriff, the