Equity in America

Extract

The first colonists in America might be divided roughly into two streams. Those that went to the North were of the Puritan stripe; those that went to the South were, so far as the ruling class is concerned, Englishmen quite in sympathy with existing affairs, who went only to better themselves. The middle colonies, between New England and Pennsylvania, were not first settled by Englishmen; they require different consideration. The people, then, who settled New England, and to a considerable extent the people who settled Pennsylvania, were not in sympathy with existing conditions in England; and they had as a result of their experience a certain antipathy to the English law as it had been administered. In Massachusetts Bay this antipathy was carried to the extent of forbidding any English lawyer to live in the colony; and they abolished the English law by ordinance, and provided that all matters should be settled by appeal to the Bible, which nreant, to them, the Old Testament. That continued for a while, but, of course, it was absolutely an unworkable condition. Men trained in the thoughts of Englishmen could not think like the ancient Jews, and could not really be governed by the law of Moses; and the ordinance rather passed out of their recollection. It was still true, however, that lawyers did not plead in their Courts. The Courts were magistrate Courts, presided over in the highest Court by the persons elected as governor and assistants, in the lower Courts by the lesser magistrates. The law administered—if one can call it law—was simply the whim or the good sense of the magistrate, along with such ordinances as had been passed. The same thing was true of the other New England colonies and—as time passed—was equally true in Pennsylvania.