ligious corporations had been
dissolved.

Not much, perhaps, remained for Cromwell's Parliament to do. The
abuses of law-making, of the Star Chamber, and other non-common-law
courts, of personal government, had been swept away under Charles I.
In 1644 the Book of Common Prayer was abolished. In 1646 the bishops
were abolished, in 1648 the king and the House of Peers, and in 1649
the king was beheaded. Cromwell's Parliament was more interested
in the raising of money and the dividing up royal lands than in
constructive legislation. They did find time to forbid the planting
of tobacco in England, and to pass an act furthering the religion of
Jesus Christ in New England; also a society for the foundation of the
gospel in New England, with power to raise money or make collections
for that purpose, provided always, they did not carry any gold,
silver, plate, or money outside of England. An act claiming that "the
Indians are renouncing their heathen sorceries and betaking themselves
to English schools and universities," possibly refers to one Indian
graduate of Harvard, Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, of the class of 1665.
There are statutes concerning the impressing of seamen; a bankruptcy
act, a statute authorizing secular marriage without a priest or church
ceremony, and the act for preferring veterans in the Spanish War in
civil service, a statute which gives a respectable antiquity to our
laws making a privileged class of veterans or the descendants of
veterans of the Civil and Spanish Wars. Under Cromwell they could
exercise any trade without apprenticeship; a recent South Carolinian
statute providing that Confederate veterans could exercise any trade
without paying the usual license tax was held unconstitutional by the
Supreme Court of South Carolina itself.

VI

AMERICAN LEGISLATION IN GENERAL

Before approaching the actual field of American legislation, it may be
wise to make a few general statements concerning it. It was some fifty
years after the adoption of the Federal Constitution before it began
in great bulk, but to-day we find in the States alone forty-six
legislative bodies, and two of Territories, besides the Federal
Congress and the limited legislatures of our insular possessions.
Nearly all of these turn out laws every year; even when the
legislatures meet biennially, they frequently have an annual session.
Only in one or two Southern States have recent constitutions
restricted them to once in four y