Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/404

 aOO ///. THE COLONIAL PERIOD for debt the court, considering the defendant's poverty, ordered him to work for the plaintiff at carpentry until the debt were extinguished. Meanwhile other creditors were for- bidden to sue him. Even after a verdict of not guilty, the court often imposed costs or ordered the accused to leave the colony.^ The attitude of Rhode Island towards lawyers is shown by the fact that by an act of the general assembly in 1729 they were forbidden to be deputies, their presence being found to be of ill consequence.^ n. THE MIDDLE COLONIES New York In this colony the common law received early recognition and an approach was made to complete and intelligent en- forcement. The population of New York was exceedingly heterogeneous ; the original Dutch settlers, the early Eng- lish settlers of various character from the different colonies and the mother country. The close knit social relations found in Massachusetts and Connecticut were here absent, and popular law could not therefore be so readily developed. There was a demand for a system of common law by which the relations and interests of these various elements may be regulated. The colony being under royal authority almost from the beginning, its rulers soon accustomed it to the prin- ciples of the English common law. Thus when the growing feeling of unity and nationalism called for a unification and harmonizing of American law. New York state, which had most successfully adapted the common law to American con- ditions, became the leader in juristic development. Its judges, like Kent, became the authoritative expounders of the American form of the common law. But, on the other hand, many of the original American ideas in jurisprudence, such as the reform of the law of real property and the law of pleading, which we find in germ in the early history of the other colonies, were carried to completion and given 127-137. • Arnold's History of Rhode Island, II, 98.^
 * Durfee, Gleanings from the Judicial History of Rhode Island, p.