For a few years North Carolina tried a still different plan for sharing responsibility between the courts and the legislature. By the act of 1814 full authority to grant separation from bed and board, for any of the causes therein named, with alimony to the wife, is conferred upon the superior court. The same tribunal may also try petitions for full divorce, dismissing the petition, dissolving the "nuptial ties or bonds of matrimony," or declaring the contract null and void, as the case demands; but it is especially provided that "no judgment, sentence, or decree of final or absolute divorce" shall be "valid until ratified by the general assembly."[139] This condition was, however, removed in 1818;[140] and ten years thereafter legislative divorce was entirely abolished, so far as it was possible to accomplish it by statute. Because "the numerous applications for divorce and alimony, annually presented to the general assembly, consume a considerable portion of time in their examination, and consequently retard the investigation of more important (_sic_) subjects of legislation;" and because "such applications might be adjudicated by other tribunals with much less expenditure to the state, and more impartial justice to individuals;" it is therefore enacted that the superior courts of law shall have "sole and original jurisdiction" in both kinds of divorce. From this act it may be inferred that the legislature had granted divorces on petitions which had not gone through the courts and come up to it for ratification; and for causes other than those named in the statute.[141] A few years later, by a constitutional amendment ratified in 1835, the assembly was deprived of the "power to grant a divorce or secure alimony in any individual case;" and the same prohibition appears in the constitution of 1876.[142] [139] _Laws_ (1814), chap. 5; also in _Haywood's Manual of the Laws of N. C._ (1819), 174-78. [140] _Acts_ (1818), chap. 968. [141] This inference is justified by the words of the act as quoted, and from the clause declaring "that all applications for other causes than those specified"--in the act of 1814--"shall be subject to the rules and regulations provided in said act for the causes therein mentioned."--_Acts_ (1827-28), 19, 20. The law of 1814, as to causes, appears unaltered in _Laws of the State_ (1821), II, 1292-95. [142] POORE, _Charters_, II, 1416 (1835), 1439 (1876).