tinuity of personnel and had intimate contacts with the domestic political 
scene. This condition was accentuated by the shifting personnel of the crown 
law officers —officials upon whose opinions in matters of law administration 
considerable reliance was put. Nowhere is this seen better than in a comparison 
of the opinion rendered in connection with the 1753 instructional alteration 
with that given in the controversy aroused by Cunningham v. Forsey. 9 
This lack of continuity is also marked by the absence of any effective conceptual 
thinking in conciliar practice. For example, the issuance of a commission 
with an appeal reserved to determine the Mohegan Indians-Connecticut 
controversy evoked no theory as to conciliar jurisdiction in intercolonial 
disputes and was virtually unknown two decades later. Of more importance 
was the failure of the Council to formulate any doctrine in its piecemeal declarations 
of nullity upon judicial and legislative review. Further, both the 
Council and the Board of Trade lacked the drive necessary to accomplish reform 
by parliamentary action —to reduce the status of the chartered colonies, 
to give appeals to England in woods preservation prosecutions, to make acts 
passed contrary to the royal instructions null and void. 
In the various colonial complaints made against the jurisdiction of the Privy 
Council, it generally went unnoticed that the successive developments in the 
scope of conciliar appellate review were in the direction of greater autonomy 
for local courts. This is immediately apparent in any comparison of eighteenthcentury 
procedure with the earlier, virtually administrative procedure in 
Channel Islands appeals and the de novo character of the hearings on seventeenth-century 
colonial appeals. The decline in the number of criminal appeals 
in which additional evidence was admitted on appeal is also symptomatic of 
the progressive adoption of the attributes of common law appellate procedure. 
No infamy should attach to the Privy Council for the effort made in Cunningham 
v. Forsey to institute appellate review of the facts, as well as the law — 
to Lieutenant-Governor Colden alone belongs the inspiration for and the execution 
of this attempt. Yet one should not be misled by the shrill clamorings 
for common law procedure that marked this cause celebre. The colonists were 
enamored of the common law only where its procedure coincided with their 
own interests. The great devotion to common law forms shown in Cunningham 
v. Forsey is singularly lacking in the legislative career of most colonies, 
as the numerous disallowances of colonial acts bear testimony. 
The final note in our discussion of the Privy Council is the inevitable one 
of decline and decay—by 1775 the power and dignity of the Committee for 
Hearing Appeals belonged to the past. By the American Revolution thirteen 
dominions were severed from the jurisdiction of the Council. Even before that 
9 Supra, p. 390 et seq.