Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/447

 13. ANDREWS: COLONIAL CONDITIONS 433 we should be guilty of accepting a hasty analogy. There were other reasons why the local agrarian system of England was in its outward form reproduced by the New England settlers. Had it not accommodated itself to their notions of equality and equity, and to the economic needs of a people settling in a new and uninhabited country, it might have been altered and changed beyond recognition. But the local land- system of England was pre-feudal in its origin, and probably grew out of a primitive system of agrarian equality, a fact which the equal strips, the scattered holdings and the common rights serve to attest. The New England settlers were enter- ing an environment similar to that out of which the English village came, and they therefore found it necessary to change the English local system but little in order to apply the methods of allotment demanded by a new country. The col- onists took no retrograde step ; all changes from the exist- ing system at home were in keeping with the higher ideas of property and equality which the New Englanders brought with them. The principles which governed their action were three: first, that of preventing the engrossing of lands and their accumulation in the hands of a few, the dangers of which in England were familiar to the colonists ; ^ secondly, that of subserving the law of equity by treating every man fairly, not only in giving him a share in conquered or purchased lands, but also in so allotting that share that he might be subject to all the advantages and drawbacks that bore upon his neighbors ; ^ and thirdly, that of hastening settlement and arise to the burdening, disturbing or depopulating of smaller plantations, were either sundry lotts or accommodations are engrossed into one hand or possessed or held by unsuitable or unfit persons," etc. Guilford Mss. Book of the More Fixed Orders. " Where as there hath been a great abuse in several towns and plantations in this colony in buying and purchasing Home-lotts and laying of them together by means whereof great depopulation may follow," etc. Laws of the Colony of Connecticut (ed. 17] 5). p. 51. Stadt in Neu-England," in the Zeitschrift fur Social-und Wirthschafts- geschichte, vol. ii. pp. 103-131, 224-240, especially p. 232, note 58. To the instances there quoted I will add two others, as the question is an important one. " And whereas by the Law of Natural Equity and Right all those that joyned in making the conquest and those that joyned in subdueing the country from a Wilderness (as it then was and in a great measure
 * " Whereas much experience shows that sundry inconveniences do
 * I have discussed this question briefly in an article entitled " Die