vested in the owners according to the nature of their respective
estates."

By this Act "all feudal tenures of every description, with all their
incidents," were "abolished." Most of the "feudal incidents" of the
socage tenure had been previously abolished by an Act passed in 1787,
under the first Constitution of the State, adopted at Kingston in 1777,
a year after the Declaration of American Independence; and socage tenure
by fixed and determinate service, not military or variable by the lord
at his will, had been adopted long before by an Act of the first
Assembly of the Province of New York held in 1691 under the first Royal
Governor, after the reconquest of the province from Holland, and in the
reign of William and Mary. This Act provided that all lands should "be
held in free and common socage according to the tenure of East Greenwich
in England." It is an interesting circumstance that the right of private
ownership in land, thus rooted in our history, should have been defended
against a threatening revolutionary movement in New York by the courage
and loyalty to the Constitution of his country as well as to his Church
of a Catholic Archbishop. For this same Assembly of the Province of New
York in 1693, in an Act "to maintain Protestant ministers and churches,"
enacted that "every Jesuit and popish priest" found in the Province
after a certain day named, should be put into "perpetual imprisonment,"
with the proviso that if he escaped and was retaken he should suffer
death. And even in the Constitution of 1777 the Protestantism of New
York expressed its hostility to the Catholic Church by exacting
subjection "in all matters ecclesiastical as well as civil."

The position of the Archbishop, both as a churchman and as a citizen,
was impregnable. When Dr. M'Glynn advocated the plan of Henry George, he
advocated at one and the same time the immoral seizure and confiscation