as established) were assigned to me; the British statutes,
from that period to the present day, to Mr. Wythe; and the Virginia laws
to Mr. Pendleton. As the law of Descents, and the Criminal law, fell of
course within my portion, I wished the committee to settle the leading
principles of these, as a guide for me in framing them; and, with
respect to the first, I proposed to abolish the law of primogeniture,
and to make real estate descendible in parcenery to the next of kin,
as personal property is, by the statute of distribution. Mr. Pendleton
wished to preserve the right of primogeniture; but seeing at once
that that could not prevail, he proposed we should adopt the Hebrew
principle, and give a double portion to the elder son. I observed, that
if the elder son could eat twice as much, or do double work, it might be
a natural evidence of his right to a double portion; but being on a par,
in his powers and wants, with his brothers and sisters, he should be on
a par also in the partition of the patrimony; and such was the decision
of the other members.

On the subject of the Criminal law, all were agreed, that the punishment
of death should be abolished, except for treason and murder; and that,
for other felonies, should be substituted hard labor in the public
works, and, in some cases, the _Lex talionis_. How this last revolting
principle came to obtain our approbation, I do not remember. There
remained, indeed, in our laws, a vestige of it in a single case of a
slave; it was the English law, in the time of the Anglo-Saxons, copied
probably from the Hebrew law of an 'eye for an eye, a tooth for a
tooth,' and it was the law of several ancient people; but the modern
mind had left it far in the rear of its advances. These points, however,
being settled, we repaired to our respective homes for the preparation
of the work.

In the execution of my part, I thought it material not to vary the
diction of the ancient statutes by modernizing it, nor to give rise to
new questions by new expressions. The text of these statutes had been so
fully explained and defined, by numerous adjudications, as scarcely ever
now to produce a question in our courts. I thought it would be useful,
also, in all new draughts, to reform the style of the later British
statutes, and of our own acts of Assembly; which, from their verbosity,
their endless tautologies, their involutions of case within case,
and parenthesis within parenthesis, and their mul