Excerpt from American Statute Law: An Analytical and Compared Digest of the Constitutions and Civil Public Statutes of All the States and Territories Relating to Persons and Property in Force January 1, 1886 Upon examination, however, the author found that the bulk of these voluminous laws was, after all, identical in the several states. He found that one main stream of legislation could be traced, occasionally comprehending all the Northern, Eastern, and N orth-western states, more often divided into two main bodies, the one following in its legislation the general model of the State of New York, the other that of the New Eng land states. He found, besides this, another important group, containing the South Western states, under the general lead of Maryland and Virginia and still a third and smaller group, comprising the gulf states. Besides these three main groups, there was one state with laws wholly anomalous (louisiana), and others (like California, Dakota, New Mexico, and Georgia) with laws peculiar to a greater or less extent. Here at once it became evident that, by a process of citing the respective laws once for all, with a list of all the states enacting them, and without repetitions, the work might be reduced by nine tenths or more of its first apparent size. But, furthermore, it will readily be seen that many of the statutes in all states are of purely local interest or special application. For instance, the law of the laying out of roads, of the manner of assessing taxes, and the laws creating special corporations, municipal or otherwise, or special kinds of corporations, can rarely be wanted by a lawyer outside of the state where such statute or corporation exists; and as every one is presumed to have the statutes of his own state at hand, it would obviously neither be possible nor profitable to collate statutes of this description. And of course all private acts and local or special laws may be wisely omitted. Perhaps one half of the bulk of the statutes was taken away by these exceptions. And, finally, for the purposes of the present edition, the author has not deemed it advisable to collate the statutes of criminal law, nor many statutes of civil procedure, such as no one will be likely to want unless he is actually conducting a case in court out of his own state. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.