Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/477

 13. ANDREWS: COLONIAL CONDITIONS 463 hostility to England that underlay the attempt of Connecti- cut to keep her charter and to preserve her privileges; it was the determination to maintain at any cost the integrity of the colony and the welfare, happiness, and prosperity of its people. In the issue which arose in 1730, as well as in that which arose in 1765, it will be found that economic causes and conditions drove the colonists into opposition to England quite as much as did theories of political independ- ence or of so-called self-evident rights of man. We have now followed step by step this important ques- tion from its starting point in the land system of New Eng- land to its final issue in the prerogatives of Crown and Par- liament. The land system, representing the pre-feudal idea rather than the feudal, was reproduced in America with some important changes. Out of this sprang the law of intestacy, differing in principle from that of England which rested upon feudal law. This difference between the common law of the two countries was taken advantage of by certain dis- affected ones of Connecticut who sought to benefit themselves by appealing to England against the colonial law. This matter, at first private, touching the lands and interests of but a few persons, became of wider importance by the vaca- tion of the law by the King in Council. By this the agrarian harmony of Connecticut, and possibly of New England, was threatened. This roused the colony, and the issue became a part of the larger question of the relations of the proprietary and charter colonies to the Crown. This made the matter of importance not merely to Connecticut and New England, but to the other colonies of this class as well. But the influence of the Winthrop case did not stop here; it passed even higher, and raised the question of fundamental importance to all the colonies as to the constitutional relations of Crown and Parliament. The settlement of this question foreshad- owed the action which Parliament was to take forty years after.