Page:Revised Statutes of the State of North Carolina - Volume 1.djvu/18

Soon after the passage of the act, the performance of the important duties which it required, was entrusted to the late Gavin Hogg, Esquire, of the city of Raleigh, in conjunction with the undersigned. At an early period after their appointment, the commissioners held a meeting, in which they made a cursory examination of the acts of assembly, and the British statutes in force in this State, and agreed upon the plan upon which the revisal would be conducted. With these preliminary arrangements, Mr Hogg's connection with the work ceased. Severe and protracted ill health prevented his further discharge of duties, upon the performance of which he had entered with zeal, and which no one was better qualified to perform in a manner creditable to himself and useful to the public. In the winter following, he resigned his commission, and the Hon. Frederic Nash, or Hillsborough, now one of the judges of the superior courts of this State, but then at the bar, was appointed to supply the vacancy. Reports of the plan and progress of the work were made by the commissioners to the governor, and through him to the legislature at its respective sessions in 1834 and 1835. The plan adopted by the commissioners was, in the language of one of their reports, "simply to digest and consolidate into one act, all the various statute laws relating to one subject, occasionally to alter vicious and inadvertent phraseology, and to insert into the body of the statute such new provisions as seemed to them manifestly proper;" and as regarded the British statutes, "to incorporate them in acts distributed according to the subject to which they relate, clothing them in a modern garb." Upon the report made at the session of 1834 no definite action was taken by the legislature, but that submitted at the subsequent sessions, was referred, together with several revised acts which had accompanied it, to a joint select committee of both houses, who, after having had the subject under consideration, reported that they deemed it inexpedient for the legislature at that session, "to attempt the re-enactment of any portion of the digest which had been completed." They, then, after expressing themselves "from a cursory examination, highly gratified both with the plan of the digest, which had been adopted, and the mode of its execution," recommended that the time for completing the revisal, which in the original act had been limited to two years, should be extended to the first day of December, 1836; that the revised acts which had been submitted by the commissioners should be returned to them, and that when they should have completed the residue, they should procure two hundred copies of the whole to be printed, and have them deposited in the governor's office for the use of the next General Assembly. A bill for that purpose was accordingly introduced, and passed, and at the session of 1836, the whole work was