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Interestingly and significantly, these practical problems in the political arena are precisely the problems with which Americans have wrestled in every age and which continue to engage us today: problems of the proper organization of society and of making it function for the common good; problems of insuring the integrity and self-restraint of its leaders, and with preventing its government from being oppressive.
The critical problems with which the Puritans in New England struggled may be summarized under three broad topics. The first was how to select leaders and representatives. From the beginning what had distinguished the Puritans was their strict criterion of church-membership and their linking of church membership with the franchise, their fear that if the unconverted could be members of the church they might become its rulers. Their underlying determination was that only saints, those chosen by God, might be allowed to ascend to political power. Their concept of a
church was, in its own very limited way, of a kind of ecclesiastical self-government: there were to be no bishops because the members of each church were fit to rule themselves. Many of the major disputes of early New England were essentially debates over who were fit rulers and how they should be selected. What were to be the relations between the magistrates and the deputies? How many deputies from each town?
Their second concern was with the proper limits of political power. This question was never better stated than by John Cotton. It is therefore most wholsome for Magistrates and Officers in Church and Common-wealth, never to affect more liberty and authority then will do them good, and the People good; for what ever transcendant power is given, will certainly over-run those that give it, and those that receive it: There is a straine in a mans heart that will sometime or other runne out to excesse, unlesse the Lord restraine it, but it is not good to venture it: It is necessary therefore, that all power that is on earth be limited. . . . The form of the early compilations of their laws shows this preoccupation. The first compilation of Massachusetts law (1641) was known as The Body of Liberties and managed to state the whole of the legal system in terms of the liberties of different members of the community. It began with a paraphrase of Magna Charta, followed by the limitations on judicial proceedings, went on to the liberties of freemen, women, children, foreigners, etc. Even the law of capital crimes was stated in the form of liberties. This conviction that government must be limited and that no person must be permitted to hold absolute power is well reflected in the first inaugural address of that decidedly non-Puritan American president, Thomas Jefferson. I know, Jefferson said, that some honest men fear that a republican government cannot be strong; that this government is not strong enough. But would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm, on the theoretic and visionary fear that this government, the worlds best hope, may by possibility want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest government on earth. . . . Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.
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