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to carry on the business of the court until the new chief justice should arrive and take the oath of office.

This is the period of the inter regnum, which lasted for almost two years. One lawyer was at the bar and not one upon the bench. From a legal point of view, no time in the court’s history is of equal interest, but the most careful search has failed to find one glimmer of light upon this period.

Few of the records of the courts for the early years of their existence can be found. Possibly the American invasion hereafter re— ferred to, and the resulting disorganization may account for their absence, but we learn from the second act of the first general as- sembly of this Island held in 1773 that prior to that enactment “many and various pro— ceedings have been had at the general courts or judicature” in the colony. By enactment of the same assembly it was provided that two terms of the supreme court should be held in each year on the third Tuesday in February and the last Tuesday in June re- spectively, at Charlottetown, where all causes civil and criminal should be tried; and that, for judicial purposes the whole Island should be regarded as one county.

When the second general assembly met for the dispatch of business in June, I 776, it found the judicial machinery broken down. In the month of November, 1775, Charlotte- town had been invaded by two “Provincial privateers” who, among other wanton depre- dations carried away the commander in chief, the surveyer general, many of the rec— ords of the court, the public seal of the Island, His Majesty's commission and divers other necessary and valuable papers and things. About the same time a new chief justice, Peter Stewart, appointed by King George III, arrived.

PAST AND PRESENT OF

He appears to have been appointed on the recommendation of the earl of VVar- wick, who wrote of him under date Decem- ber 12, 1774. “Mr. Stewart was bred to the law and upwards of twenty years in the prac- tice of it. He is a large proprietor on the Island and has sent near two hundred people thither, who have been settled upwards of two years.” \

On his way to this Island with his wife and ten children he was wrecked and lost almost all the property he had. On his ar- rival he found the colony in such a distracted state that he could not procure his commis- sion as directed by the royal order and was therefore powerless to act when the Febru- ary term of 1776 came on. No court being then held, it was considered that the succes- sion was broken and remedial legislation was resorted to to put the courts again in opera- tion. No further interruption of a serious character appears to have taken place during the remaining part of the eighteenth century —a period which will now be considered separately.

In the dusty time-wom minutes of the court are recorded in terse official state- ments, events which made or marred the lives of many actors in that almost forgotten drama. It seems strange to us that in that far—off time in the “good old days of the pioneers"yvhen mutual hopes and hardships might well have proven a bond of brother- hood the courts resounded with the clash of opposing interests and in faded ink on mouldering paper are inscribed records of strife, misfortune and crime.

In keeping with the prevailing theories of that period the penalties for breach of the law were calculated to prevent crime by the ferocity of the punishment. The criminal himself was regarded chiefly as a means of