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ness and drunkenness with severity[1]. Innkeepers are forbidden to furnish more than a certain quantity of liquor to each consumer; and simple lying, whenever it may be injurious[2], is checked by a fine or a flogging. In other places, the legislator, entirely forgetting the great principles of religious toleration which he had himself upheld in Europe, renders attendance on divine service compulsory[3], and goes so far as to visit with severe punishment[4], and even with death, the Christians who chose to worship God according to a ritual differing from his own[5]. Sometimes indeed the zeal of his enactments induces him to descend to the most frivolous particulars: thus a law is to be found in the same Code which prohibits the use of tobacco[6]. It must not be forgotten that these fantastical and
- ↑ Code of 1650, pp. 50. 57.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 64.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 44.
- ↑ This was not peculiar to Connecticut. See, for instance, the law which, on the 13th of September 1644, banished the Anabaptists from the State of Massachusetts. (Historical Collection of State Papers, vol. i. p. 538.) See also the law against the Quakers, passed on the 14th of October 1656. “Whereas,” says the preamble, “an accursed race of heretics called Quakers has sprung up,” &c. The clauses of the statute inflict a heavy fine on all captains of ships who should import Quakers into the country. The Quakers who may be found there shall be whipt and imprisoned with hard labour. Those members of the sect who should defend their opinions shall be first fined, then imprisoned, and finally driven out of the province.—Historical Collection of State Papers, vol. i. p. 630.
- ↑ By the penal law of Massachusetts, any Catholic priest who should set foot in the colony after having been once driven out of it was liable to capital punishment.
- ↑ Code of 1650, p. 96.
