Helen Hill Miller

George Mason

The adoption of written constitutions in the American states during the third quarter of the eighteenth century introduced the modern governmental era. The political theory and practice that appeared in the British-American colonies as separation from the mother country neared was an affirmation with worldwide application, first in the European revolutions and reforms that began in France in 1789 and continued down the nineteenth century, and then in colonial revolts on other continents.

The succession of New World constitutions of which Virginia's, with Mason as its chief architect, was the first, declared the source of political authority to be the people, and spelled out, for an increasingly literate electorate to read, the functions of the state, its powers, and the limitations on those powers. And in addition to making clear what a government was entitled to do, most of them were prefaced by a list of individual rights of the citizens under their jurisdiction, rights that government should in no case infringe, rights whose maintenance was government's primary reason for being. Mason wrote the first of these lists. He was fond of saying that good government required 'frequent recurrence to fundamental principles'; his declaration of rights posted the principles where all might see.