And this was in our own country, only a century and a half ago! A Maryland statute enumerates among capital offences: manslaughter, malicious trespass, forgery, receiving stolen goods, and "stealth of one's self"--which is the unlawful departure of a servant out of service or out of the colony without the consent of his master or mistress--"offender to suffer pains of death by hanging except the offender can read clerk-like, and then he shall lose his hand, and be burned in the hand or forehead with a hot iron, and forfeit his lands at the time of the offense committed." This test of ability to read--"_legit aut non legit?_"--was manifestly a clause inserted to favor the clergy, and so woven into the tissue of mediæval law, that the Reformation had been powerless to unravel it. It is noticeable that the economical planters wisely preferred those forms of punishment, which cost the State nothing but the services of the constable and the executioner, to the confinement in prison, which involved the support of the criminal at public expense. Prisons, of course, existed almost from the beginning. In the Maryland archives of 1676, I read that "Cap{t} Quigly brought into this house the act for Building the State House and prisson at S{t} Maries, and desires to know what manner of Windowes the house shall have." It is at length decided accordingly by the Assembly "that the windowes are to bee of Wood with substanciall Iron barres and th{t} the wood of the frame of the Windowes be layd in Oyle." For the safer guarding of the prisoners, it is also directed that the windows, which were to be only twenty by thirty inches in size, be protected by "Three Iron Barres upright, and two athwart." The prisons found little occupation as compared with the pillory and the whipping-post. The latter was the common corrector of drunkenness, which was a too frequent offence in those old days in the Cavalier Colonies, when the gentry sipped their madeira over the polished dining-table and the poor man mixed his toddy in his noggin of pewter or wood. All men drank, and most men drank too much. Wines played an important part in the colonial imports. A Virginia statute of 1645 fixed the price of canary and sherry at thirty pounds of tobacco, madeira and "Fyall" at twenty pounds, while aqua-vitæ and brandy ran up to forty. A few years later Master George Fletcher, his heirs and executors, were granted by statute, the sole right to brew in wooden vessels for fourteen years. Maryland laid a tax upon "Rhume, Perrie, Molasses, Sider, Quince Drink or Strong Beer Imported, each 5 lbs tob. per gal."