That system with its correlative rights of protection by the King or the lord, and of service as soldiers by the tenants or vassals, carried down through all classes of society from the highest to the lowest, termed the feudal system, thus introduced, became the basis of the English land system and land law. From William of Normandy to Charles the Second, gradually developed in the earliest reigns of the Norman Kings to its fullest extent, its principles governed English land, English law, and Engli>h thought, until the enactment of the statute of 1660 in the twelfth year of Charles the Second abolished feudalism forever, practically restored the old Saxon allodial tenures, and turned to freedom the mind of England. " Perhaps," said that most learned chief justice of Massachusetts, James Sullivan, in 1801, then that State's Attorney-General, " the English Nation are more indebted to this one act for the share of liberty they have enjoyed for a century and a half past, and for the democratic principles by that law retained in their government, than to Magna Charta, and all the other instruments of which they boast.'"

To show how entirely different the "feudal system" was from the systems introduced into New- York by the Dutch and English ; and how erroneous have been, and are, the views that Lave been expressed by American, and New England, as well as New York, writers, respecting the latter, it will be well to recur to what "feudalism'" really was.

Scrcely any subject of an historical nature has been more fully and thoroughly investigated, studied, and written upon, in late years, by modern historical scholars than this. Germany, France, and England, have each produced writers who have given to the world the results of searche-s and investigations of the most exhaustive character ; von Maurer, Waitz, Eichorn, Roth, and Richter, in the former, Guizot,