committeemen, with power to hold a court and a market, to admit citizens, to impose fines, and to make ordinances. The bailiff and first two burgesses were constituted justices of the peace.[1] The primitive Solons and Lycurguses of Germantown did not want their laws to go unheeded. They were not keen enough to invent that convenient maxim Ignorantia legis neminem excusat. It was, therefore, ordered that “On the 19th of 1st mo. in each year the people shall be called together, and the laws and ordinances read aloud to them.”[2] Oh ye modern legislators! think how few must have been the statutes, and how plain the language in which they were written, in that happy community.
As we have seen, the greater number of the first Crefeld emigrants were weavers. This industry increased so that Frame describes Germantown as a place —
| “ | Where lives High German people and Low Dutch |
| Whose trade in weaving linnen cloth is much; | |
| There grows the Flax as also you may know | |
| That from the same they do divide the tow;” |
and Thomas says they made “very fine German Linen such as no Person of Quality need be ashamed to wear.” When, therefore, Pastorius was called upon to devise a town seal, he selected a clover on one of whose leaves was a vine, on another a stalk of flax, and on the third a weaver's spool, with the motto, “Vinum, Linum, et Textrinum.” This seal happily suggests the relations of the town with the far past, and it is a curious instance of the permanence of causes that these simple people, after the lapse of six centuries, and after being transplanted to a distance of thousands of miles, should still be pursuing the occupation of the Waldenses of Flanders. The corpora-
