Education of Indians.
This general assembly was both a legislative and a judicial body. It enacted laws and prescribed the penalties for breaking them, it tried before a jury persons accused of crime and saw that due punishment was inflicted upon those who were adjudged guilty, it determined civil causes, assessed the amount of damages, and saw that they were collected. From sweeping principles of constitutional law down to the pettiest sumptuary edicts, there was nothing which this little parliament did not superintend and direct. On one occasion, "the delegates from Captain John Martin's plantation were excepted to because of a peculiar clause in his patent releasing him from obeying any order of the colony except in times of war." A few days afterward the said Captain Martin appeared at the bar of the house, and the speaker asking whether he would relinquish the particular clause exempting him from colonial authority, replied that he would not yield any part of his patent. The assembly then resolved that the burgesses of his plantation were not entitled to seats.[113] Such exemptions of individual planters by especial license from the home government, although rare, were of course anomalies not to be commended; in some cases they proved to be nuisances, and in course of time all were got rid of. From this constitutional question the assembly turned to the conversion of the red men, and enacted that each borough or hundred should obtain from the Indians by just and fair means a certain number of Indian children to be educated "in true religion and a civil course of life; of which children the most towardly boys in wit and graces of nature [are] to be brought up by them in the first elements of literature, so as to be fitted for the college intended for them, that from thence they may be sent to that work of conversion." Few enactments of any legislature have ever been better intended or less fruitful than this.
Drunkards.
It was moreover enacted that any person found drunk was for the first offence to be privately reproved by the minister; the second time this reproof was to be publicly administered; the third time the offender must be put in irons for twelve hours and pay a fine; for any subsequent offences he must be severely punished at the discretion of the governor and council.
Dress.
To guard the community against excessive vanity in dress, it was enacted that for all public contributions every unmarried man must be assessed in church "according to his own apparel;" and every married man must be assessed "according to his own and his wife's apparel."
Flirting.
Not merely extravagance in dress, but such social misdemeanours as flirting received due legislative condemnation. Pretty maids were known to encourage hopes in more than one suitor, and gay deceivers of the sterner sex would sometimes seek to win the affections of two or more women at the same time. Wherefore it was enacted that "every minister should give notice in his church that what man or woman soever should use any word or speech tending to a contract of marriage to two several persons at one time ... as might entangle or breed scruples in their consciences, should for such their offense, either undergo corporal correction [by whipping] or be punished by fine or otherwise, according to the quality of the person so offending."[114]
Scandal.
Clergymen.