shillings and no more. Chapter I., Acts 1714, provides that no person shall "entertain" more than two attorneys, "that the adverse Party may have Liberty to retain others of them to assist him, upon his Tender of the established Fee, which they may not refuse." Hard times for attorneys, truly!
Chapter IV., Acts of 1700, enacts that all Jesuits and Roman Catholic priests and missionaries shall depart out of the Province, under penalty of perpetual imprisonment; and if they should escape from such imprisonment, to be punished by death.
By Chapter VI., Acts of 1705, any negro or mulatto presuming to strike any person of the English or other Christian nation, was to be severely whipped in the discretion of the court.
While the Indian inhabitants of the Province were carefully restrained from lawlessness, their rights were vigilantly protected by various wise and just laws. Severe penalties were imposed for selling them liquor, cheating them out of their lands, and other wise defrauding them. Their lands, too, were not liable to be taken for their debts.
The foregoing gleanings convey a fair idea of the flavor, so to speak, of the then laws.
While we may condemn the more barbarous modes of punishment then in vogue, and the undue severity of some of the penalties, one cannot but feel that in case of some particularly brutal and savage crimes, notably house-breaking, garroting, and wifebeating, we might well return to the severe but salutary discipline of the lash as administered to evil-doers in those days by the good citizens of Massachusetts.
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