The People as Constituent Power 165
divine inspiration of the Old and New Testaments. Voters elected the legislators,
the executive councillors, sheriffs, coroners, tax- assessors, and justices of the peace.
Voting was by ballot. The president was chosen by the legislature and the executive
council; he had no veto or appointive powers, and what powers he did have he
could exercise only in agreement with his council. All officers were elected for one
year, except that councillors served for three. Rotation of office was provided for;
legislators, councillors, president, and sheriffs could be reelected only a certain
number of times. Doors of the legislative assembly must always be open to the
public. There was a kind of referendum, in that no bill passed by the assembly,
short of emergency, became law until submitted for public consideration and en-
acted in the assembly of the following year, if there was no public objection. Of-
ficeholders received pay, but if revenues of any office became too large the assembly
could reduce them. All officers and judges could be impeached by the assembly.
Judges of the Supreme Court could be removed by the assembly for “misbehavior.”
There was an elected council of censors, or board of review, which every seven years
ascertained whether the constitution had been preserved inviolate, and called a
convention if amendment seemed necessary.
The Pennsylvania constitution represented the doctrine of a single party, namely
the democrats, people of the kind who had formerly had little to do with govern-
ment, and whose main principle was that government should never become a
separate or vested interest within the state. This was indeed an understandable
principle, at a time when government, in all countries in varying degree, had in fact
become the entrenched interest of a largely hereditary governing class. The Penn-
sylvania constitution substituted almost a direct democracy, in which no one in
government could carry any responsibility or pursue any sustained program of his
own. Many people in Pennsylvania objected to it from the beginning. It must be
remembered that the democratic constitution did not signify that Pennsylvania
was realiy more democratic than some of the other states; it signified, rather, that
Pennsylvania was more divided, and that conservatism was stronger, certain upper-
class and politically experienced elements, which elsewhere took a leading part in
the Revolution, being in Pennsylvania tainted with Anglophilism. Whether the
constitution of 1776 was workable or not, these people soon put an end to it. It
lasted only until 1790.^8
The most interesting case is that of Massachusetts. Here the great political
thinker was John Adams, who became the main author of the Massachusetts con-
stitution of 1780, which in turn had an influence on the Constitution of the United
States. In his own time Adams was denounced as an Anglomaniac and a Mono-
crat. In our own time some sympathizers with the eighteenth- century democrats
have considered him very conservative, while on the other hand theorists of the
“new conservatism” would persuade us that John Adams was in truth the Ameri-
can Edmund Burke. I confess that I see very little in any of these allegations.
Adams in January 1776 published some Thoughts on Government, for the guid-
ance of those in the various colonies who were soon to declare independence and
8 Ibid., 214–86; J. P. Selsam, The Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776: a Study in Revolutionary
Democracy (Philadelphia, 1936).