supposed to hold correspondence with the enemy or who had committed some other specified acts, and might punish those whom they adjudged to be guilty with imprisonment for three months or banishment for seven years. Persons opposed to liberty and independence were prohibited from the practice of law in the courts; and any parent whose sons went off and adhered to the enemy was subject to a tax of ninepence in the pound value of such parent’s estate for each and every such son. The Congress naturally left such matters largely to the individual states, but nevertheless passed a resolution subjecting to martial law and death all who should furnish provisions, etc., to the British army in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, and resolved that all loyalists taken in arms should be sent to the states to which they belonged, there to be dealt with as traitors.[171] In regard to this subject of legal attainder and exile, Mr. Sabine remarks very moderately and sensibly: “Nor is it believed that either the banishment, or the confiscation laws, as they stood, were more expedient than just. The latter did little towards relieving the public necessities, and served only to create a disposition for rapacity, and to increase the wealth of favored individuals. Had the estates, which were seized and sold, been judiciously or honestly managed, a considerable sum would have found its way to the treasury; but, as it was, the amount was inconsiderable, some of the wisest and purest Whigs of the time hung their heads in shame, because of the passage of measures so unjustifiable, and never ceased to speak of them in terms of severe reprobation. Mr. Jay’s disgust was unconquerable, and he never would purchase any property that had been forfeited under the Confiscation Act of New York.”[172] Curwen, a Salem loyalist who was allowed to return after the war, writes in terms that, though exaggerated, yet describe the result upon public morals of the confiscations: “So infamously knavish has been the conduct of the commissioners, that though frequent attempts have been made to bring them to justice, and respond for the produce of the funds resting in their hands, so numerous are the defaulters in _that august body_, the General Court, that all efforts have hitherto proved in vain. Not twopence in the pound have arrived to the public treasury of all the confiscations.”[173]