Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/467

 13. ANDREWS: COLONIAL CONDITIONS 453 none of the laws of England either common or statute to be pleaded in their courts." ^ According to the opinion held by WInthrop and Wilks the intestate law was clearly contrary to the law of England. Even Lieutenant Governor Law of the colony seems to have inclined to this view, for he came to the conclusion that the colony in acting in the past, contrary to the view expressed by Wilks, had been mistaken.^ But Gov. Talcott was led into no such concession ; he stood firmly on the ground already taken, and adroitly persisted in maintaining the complete validity of the intestate law. He probably realized that under the circumstances concession was more dangerous than resistance, and that to accept Wilks's theory would be to strike a blow at the absolute integrity of the charter. " We would," he writes, " with the greatest prostration request your Majesty, that when we find any rules of law needful for the welfare of your Majesty's subjects here, which is not contrary to and agrees well with some one of the Tryangles of the law of England, as it then is, or heretofore had been, when England might have been under the like circumstances Gershom Bulkeley says much the same in his " Will and Doom," but facts come to us from his pen strangely distorted, while his arguments are full of pedantry and bitterness. " The case is otherwise with us, their Majesties are not yet received to reign in Connecticut, their laws are of no force or effect here." ..." The abolition of the Common and Statute laws of England and so of all humane laws, except the forgeries of our own popular and rustical shop ... A strange fancy that com- ing over from England to another of the King's dominions we should so far cease to be his subjects as that the laws of our King and Nation should not reach us." The most recent legal decision affecting our sub- ject is that of Justice Baldwin in " Campbell's Appeal from Probate," 64 Connecticut Reports, 1894. He held that the Connecticut rule of in- heritance, differing fundamentally from the rule of England, had been the uniform doctrine of the Connecticut courts (p. 290) ; and he gave it as his opinion " that the common law rule of the exclusion from inherit- ance of all tracing their descent through uninheritable blood was never in force in Connecticut" (p. 292). His decision is both historically and judicially sound, the " Act for the Settlement of Intestate Estates," which was to take the place of the old Act. It excluded females from the inheritance, but admitted the younger sons to inherit with the eldest son, as co-heirs. This did not better matters at all for it was equally contrary to the common law of England with the older Act. State Archives, Civil Offices II, doc. 169. Foreipn Correspondence II, doc. 146. See Wilks's remarks upon this Act. Talcott Papers, I, p. 241.
 * B. T. Papers, Proprieties, M. 49. See also Talcott Papers, I, p. 154.
 * Talcott Papers, I, p. 121. It was Jonathan Law who in 1731 drafted