popularly elected houses of the colonial legislatures. When the
Crown resorted to dissolving the legislatures, the revolting
colonists kept up and observed the forms of government. When the
legislature was prevented from meeting, the members would come
together and call themselves a congress or a convention, and,
instead of adopting laws or orders, would issue what were really
nothing more than recommendations, but which they expected would
be obeyed by their supporters. To enforce these recommendations
extra-legal committees, generally backed by public opinion and
sometimes concretely supported by an organized "mob," would meet
in towns and counties and would be often effectively centralized
where the opponents of the British policy were in control.

In several of the colonies the want of orderly government became
so serious that, in 1775, the Continental Congress advised them
to form temporary governments until the trouble with Great
Britain had been settled. When independence was declared Congress
recommended to all the States that they should adopt governments
of their own. In accordance with that recommendation, in the
course of a very few years each State established an independent
government and adopted a written constitution. It was a time when
men believed in the social contract or the "compact theory of the
state," that states originated through agreement, as the case
might be, between king and nobles, between king and people, or
among the people themselves. In support of this doctrine no less
an authority than the Bible was often quoted, such a passage for
example as II Samuel v, 3: "So all the elders of Israel came to
the King to Hebron; and King David made a covenant with them in
Hebron before the Lord; and they anointed David King over
Israel." As a philosophical speculation to explain why people