Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/450

 436 ///. THE COLONIAL PERIOD conveniences of the inhabitants rather than to the common and statute law of England, and the policy of the colony at all times was to remain hidden as far as possible from the notice of the home authorities. It is no wonder, therefore, that there should have grown up under the conditions — agrarian and economic — attendant on the settlement of a new, partly uninhabited, partly unconquered territory, laws based not on legal theory but on custom, laws that either were not known to English law ^ or were not in accord with it. Of all these laws none was more important, more an organic part of the life of the colony or fundamental to its welfare, than that which governed the disposal of intestate estates. It is manifest that people influenced by the principles already mentioned in their distribution of land would apply the same principles to the distribution of the realty of an intestate. They certainly would not have undermined the colonial struc- ture by admitting into its construction methods foreign to the general plan. Primogeniture, favorable to the accumula- ton of estates, but unfavorable to a rapid increase of the inhabitants, a furtherance of agriculture, and a cultivation of the soil, and opposed to the natural law of equity, was not in accord with the principles of the New England settlers. The intestacy law was, therefore, the unavoidable and logical outcome of the principles which underlay the land-system of Board of Trade, B. T. Papers, Plantations General, Entry Book, D, fol. 201, Cf. Milford Town Records, I, 1; Talcott Papers I, 143, II. Appen- dix. " Instructions to Agent." Gershom Bulkeley in his " Will and Doom" complains that "by this Law all the Law of England (Common or Statute or other) is exploded at once." (From MSS. copy of the transcript sent over by Lord Cornbury in the possession of the Conn. Hist. Society. The transcript is in B. T. Papers, Proprieties, N. 20.) I know of but two Connecticut Acts directly taken from the English Statute law before 1750. First, " Act about Bastards " from 21 Car. c. 27 and second, " Act for Ease of those who soberly Dissent " from 1 Wm. and M. c. 18 commonly called the Toleration Act. Five others, however, are probably based on English Statute law. 1. "Act concern- ing the Dowry of Widows." 2. " Act concerning forms of Writs." 3. " Act concerning Deputies Salary." 4. " Act for Regulating Juries and Wiltnesses." 5. " Act relating to Sureties upon Mean Process in Civil Action." In 1750 the Colony printed all Acts passed by Parliament which were considered to be binding on the colony. There are ten Acts in all, and none of these had been reenacted by the colony. Conn. Col. Rec. viii. p. 352. ^ Two laws certainly were not known to English law. 1 . " Act for the punishment of Lying." 2. "An Act for the preventing of Oppres- sion."