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Sioussat's The English Statutes in Maryland, 1903
Volume 195, Page 66   View pdf image (33K)
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66 The English Statutes in Maryland. [530
father.7 But apart from this personal influence, and its fruit
in the next generation, the distinctly legal character of the con-
troversy over the English statutes undoubtedly helped to
stamp a similar feature upon the subsequent constitutional
development of the colony. This emphasis on the legal method
of procedure was older than Dulany's work; it was in some
sense a characteristic of Maryland's development from the
beginning, but it was reinforced by the succession of legal
documents which Dulany wrote for the Assembly. Hence-
forth, to the Revolution, the lawyers led the Assembly to
attack one part of the government after another, and the bar
of Maryland increased the roll of distinguished names till
the Carrolls, Paca and Chase won, on the patriotic side, fame
which his Tory opinions lost to the younger Dulany.
English law, however, was not the only source of the gen-
eral principles which these papers expound. Of really more
novel significance is the emphasis on the Law of Nature.
The progress of the colonial mind, before the Revolution,
to clarity and agreement on the political relation of the mother
country and the colonies is to be traced in a mass of litera-
ture which lies beyond the limits of our consideration here.
After the Stamp Act the American colonists were not anxious
to claim English statutes; on the contrary, they finally denied
the right of Parliament to legislate at all for the colonies.
Yet they clung closely, for awhile, to their English rights and
liberties: and indulged in a good deal of curious logic to
maintain their English privileges without their English re-
sponsibilities. If we consider, for example, the Declaration
and Resolves adopted bv the First Continental Congress, we
find the second paragraph emphasizing these English liber-
ties. the third declaring that they had not forfeited them by
emigration, and the fifth and sixth claiming the right to the
'-The Author of the Considerations on the Propriety of Taxing
America, which Chatham used in England, was a legal oracle in
the Southern Colonies until, when the struggle between the Pro-
prietor and the Popular Party became intense, his defense of pre-
rogative cost him popular favor and kept him on the Tory side in
the Revolution.

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Sioussat's The English Statutes in Maryland, 1903
Volume 195, Page 66   View pdf image (33K)
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