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The Plain Dealer, Numb. III - 6

been worth while for the province to have given him a considerable sum of money to have that matter, &c.”-----The lawyer has probably the original of this in his possession. But I find that it little avails me to prove, that many thousands were given as bribes to obtain laws, since our Quakers still affirm that the laws thus purchased were righteous and good, and that I am lost to reason and an enemy to virtue and justice for calling those laws iniquitous. It is humourous enough to hear shallow-pated politicians, creatures of t’other day, who are only swelled up by the breath of a tyrannical wicked faction and their tools, to hear them contradicting the decrees of his Majesty and all his Council, as they do in this very case.

ONE of the acts we obtained by a bribe, was an act for recording Warrants and Surveys. And by this act it was provided, That the true right of property should be vested from the moment the warrants were delivered; thus making a deed or patent of no value at all. The Lords of Trade think, that our Assembly intended by this act both to injure the Proprietor and the Province. For at present a man pays a small sum of money and obtains a warrant, which is a conditional agreement, that such land shall be conveyed to him upon his paying the rest of the money, which perhaps he does at the distance of many year. By this means the Proprietor and Purchaser are equally secure; the one reserving his property in the land until it is paid for, and the other having his warrant for the land when ever he shall pay for it. And by this means the poor man lives securely on lands, until by his industry he is enabled to compleat the purchase; and by this regulation our province has been so hastily peopled. But this speedy increase must have ceased upon the new regulation, as the Proprietors must either have obliged every man to pay £15 per hundred acres the moment he received his warrant, or been in danger of loosing whatever was trusted. For any man obtaining

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