resumed under Charles II, 202 and subsequently standard usage for reports 
upon colonial acts. Quite understandably, English administrators of the early 
eighteenth century who stood watch over this legislation conceived of their 
powers in terms of the current handling of Irish bills. 203 
If we have seemed to belabor the Irish precedent and its role in connecting 
a very old administration with one more recent, it is because of its diuturnal 
character and because its very obviousness makes it a piece of speaking evidence 
capable of persuading the most skeptical. The significance of the several 
things done with respect to the medieval dominions necessarily gains stature 
if these deeds can be brought into a causal relationship with the ideas and the 
contrivances employed in ruling the New World possessions. This problem is 
one of relevancy as lawyers understand the term. As we shall notice in a moment, 
the accumulation of medieval legal doctrine was made relevant as a 
matter of law a year after Jamestown was settled, and as a result we believe 
that various ancillary practices were carried along into the succeeding decades. 
The whole matter is one of profound importance to the development of what 
has come to be called the Atlantic community, and it deserves to be lifted out 
of the obscurity in which it has hitherto lain. 
This neglect may be ascribed in part to the unhappy partition of history 
into ages, eras, and periods, a division invented as a convenience, but which has 
so worked upon historians that one who holds a warrant for the colonial period 
will not serve it on some fugitive fact in the precincts of the Middle Ages. It 
may be attributed in part to the small esteem accorded to legal materials as 
sources of general history, an attitude which has made them too often dispensable 
even in the reconstruction of political institutions. By thus misprizing 
these rich resources historians have immunized themselves from the mellow- 
ing effects which follow upon a due familiarity with the law's monuments. 
For if there is one thing of philosophic worth to be derived from acquaintance 
with the common law practice of precedents it is an awareness of the principle 
of constant encroachment —that the bounds of the past overrun those of the 
present and that in the marches of the present the limits of the future will be 
found. It is this principle which guides the lawyer who has a hard search to 
make in the complex genealogy of rules, in the hunt for genes in an old judgment 
or recent that may produce a predictable offspring tomorrow. It is a 
principle, moreover, which may be applied with equal profit to the tracing of 
any phase of human activity which has displayed an inherent longevity, and 
202 APC, Bom., 1613-14, 166, 602; APC, 
Dom., 1615-16, 15, 90; CSP, Ireland, 1663-65, 
315, 708, CSP, Ireland, i666-6g, 532. 
203 CSP, Colonial, 1704 no. 282 (Popple to the 
Attorney General and Solicitor General requesting 
an opinion on certain Virginia laws: "These 
Bills may be altered in any part thereof as Bills 
transmitted from Ireland").