IV THE REGULATION OF APPEALS In the period following the reorganization of 1696 the various governments, agencies, and institutions affected by or interested in the appellate process were much more preoccupied with its regulation than they had been even in the last years of the Stuarts. There were, in the first place, the directions of the home authorities immediately responsible for colonial administration conveyed to the royal governors. These were the basic declarations of policy, and in certain ways they affected even the chartered and proprietary jurisdictions; back of these instructions loomed certain acts of Parliament relative to domestic litigation. These acts, because they were statutes, were viewed in certain quarters as even more fundamental than the orders emanating from Whitehall. There were, furthermore, regulations by colonial enactment, by autonomous rules of court, and by proprietary instructions. These we shall discuss in the order named, and we shall then consider the obscure matter of the rules respecting vice-admiralty appeals. Finally, we shall review briefly the regulations for jurisdictions not in the Western Hemisphere. There is probably no aspect of the appeal problem more leaden than these regulations, and yet they were so fundamental to the development and administration of the jurisdiction that they must be considered in detail. The dullness of the subject is due chiefly to the circumstance that in England the rules appear to have been settled and occasionally subjected to small alteration quite arbitrarily and without any considered effort at evolving a scheme at once useful to the plantations and to the home government. Similarly, the colonial enactments, since they had to be cast in close conformity with the official matrix, have an equally intractable fiat quality. So far as any relation to basic political and social matters is concerned, the regulations are as withdrawn as a multiplication table. The policy of the crown after 1696 was built directly upon the work of the Lords Committee of Trade and Plantations, which, as we have seen, from 1679 onward by instructions or commissions had effected a somewhat uneven regulation of the appellate process. By 1696 these regulations, in epitome, provided for appeals in cases of error in civil causes to the Governor and Council with minimal requirements ranging from to and with provisions for giving security. From thence appeals were allowed to the King in Council in cases involving more than specified minimums, which varied from