The nature of the questions, too, which they were to discuss, and of the measures which they were to adopt, were to be considered in determining by what method of voting those questions and measures should be decided. The Congress had been called to secure the _rights_ of the colonies. What were those rights? By what standard were they to be ascertained? By the law of nature, or by the principles of the English Constitution, or by the charters and fundamental laws of the colonies, regarded as compacts between the crown and the people, or by all of these combined? If the law of nature alone was to determine their rights, then all allegiance to the British crown was to be regarded as at an end. If the principles of the English Constitution, or the charters, were to be the standard, the law of nature must be excluded from consideration. This exclusion would of necessity narrow the ground, and deprive them of a resource to which Parliament might at last compel them to look.[12] In order, therefore, to leave the whole field open for consideration, and at the same time to avoid committing themselves to principles irreconcilable with the preservation of allegiance and their colonial relation to Great Britain, it was necessary to consider themselves as an assembly of committees from the different colonies, in which each colony should have one voice, through the delegates whom it had sent to represent and act for it. But, as if foreseeing the time when population would become of necessity the basis of congressional power, when the authority of Parliament should have given place to a system of American continental legislation, they inserted, in the resolve determining that each colony should have one vote, a caution that would prevent its being drawn into precedent. They declared, as the reason for the course which they adopted, that the Congress were not possessed of, or able to procure, the proper materials for ascertaining the importance of each colony.[13]
It appears, therefore, very clear, that an examination of the relations of the first Congress to the colonies which instituted it will not enable us to assign to it the character of a government. Its members were not elected for the express purpose of making a revolution. It was an assembly convened from separate colonies, each of which had causes of complaint against the imperial government to which it acknowledged its allegiance to be due, and each of which regarded it as essential to its own interests to make common cause with the others, for the purpose of obtaining redress of its own grievances. The idea of separating themselves from the mother country had not been generally entertained by the people of any of the colonies. All their public proceedings, from the commencement of the disputes down to the election of delegates to the first Congress, including the instructions given to those delegates, prove, as we have seen, that they looked for redress and relief to means which they regarded as entirely consistent with the principles of the British Constitution.[14]