This is the doctrine on which republics are founded. Largely due to Johnson’s influence was the passing by the Assembly of an act for the better survey and allotment of lands in the province. At the English conquest of 1664 the excellent Dutch customs of land survey, measurement, registry, and allotment had been changed for the tedious forms of English common law. In consequence, there was much confusion in regard to claims and boundaries. Large tracts of land had been granted by the British Government, under letters patent, in which the exact quantity of land given away was not stated, nor the correct boundaries named. Further, the popular methods of measurement in vogue—such as by counting off the steps made by a grown man, or by using horse-reins or bridles in lieu of a surveyor’s chain—were not calculated to insure accuracy. Not only were constant trespassings made, both with honest and dishonest intent, upon the king’s domain,—that is, the lands of the Indians,—but there were frequent troubles about the division of the great patents. The lawyers held that when the boundaries were uncertain, the title was void. The only way to settle the many disputes was to have all the patents and tracts accurately surveyed by the king’s surveyor-general, and done in so scientific a manner that his lines should be final; while the names of the patentees, the size of the patent, and the year when patented, should be matter of public knowledge. The good fruits of this piece of legislation were the removal of much of the irritation felt by the Indians, and the prevention of further encroachments on the royal lands. In a word, close approximation was made to the methods followed in the Republic of Holland for centuries, and established in the New Netherlands by the first settlers from the Fatherland. After the Revolution, under the Surveyor-General of the United States, Simeon De Witt, a Hollander by descent, and familiar with the Dutch methods, this system, enlarged and improved, became that of the whole nation from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It is this system, lying at the basis of the land laws of the United States, which so won the encomium of Daniel Webster in his great address at Plymouth, when he said that our laws relating to land had made the American Republic.