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resort to the Law of Rome.^[1] It may be supposed, since the Dutch Colonies stood in no peculiar relation to the province of Holland more than to any other provinces of the Union, that even general customs of this province had no preferential claim to acceptance in the Colonies. In theory this is true. In practice, perhaps, the predominant partner carried the day. In South Africa at all events there seems to be some presumption in favour of the admission of a general custom of Holland rather than that of any other province as part of the common law of the Colony.^[2]

The Roman-Dutch Law in the Colonies under British Rule:
(a) At the Cape;

The Dutch settlements of the Cape of Good Hope, Ceylon, and Guiana, passed into the hands of the British at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Cape was taken from the Dutch in 1795, given back in 1803, and retaken in 1806, since when it has remained part of the British Dominions. It does not appear that any express stipulation was made upon the occasion of either the first or the second cession for the retention of the Roman-Dutch law. Its continuance is the expression of the settled principle of English law and policy that colonies acquired by cession or by conquest

1. Burge, vol. i, p. 116.
2. Per Kotzé J.P., in Fitzgerald v. Green [1911] E.D.L. at p. 493: ‘There is no rule which makes it incumbent upon us, under the circumstances, to adopt the law of North Holland in preference to that of South Holland, although in a conflict between the law of the different provinces of the Netherlands the Courts in South Africa, we are told, have generally followed that of the province of Holland.’ Dr. Bisschop (Burge, Colonial and Foreign Laws (2nd. ed.), vol. i, p. 91) directs attention to the preponderating influence in the affairs of the Company of the Chambers of Amsterdam and Middelburg, which accounts for the fact that the Company was held to be domiciled within the jurisdiction of the Court of Holland. The same writer has observed elsewhere that the Colonial Courts in most cases got their law, so far as it was not comprised in local statutes and customs, from text-books rather than from the original sources, with the result that ‘the local law of the Netherlands—so far as it was not referred to by writers on the Roman-Dutch Law—would be ignored’. ‘In the Dutch East and West Indies the same method of legal application and interpretation would be followed as in the Low Countries, viz., to apply first the local statutes and customs and subsidiarily the Roman law as explained by the learned jurists at home.’ Law Quarterly Review, vol. xxiv (1908), p. 169.