leave, or conditional pardon, on his arrival in the colony. Finding, however, that the tea and other China goods, which his house was in the habit of importing from Bengal, were undersold in the Sydney market by a highly respectable American merchant in Sydney, who had a correspondent in Canton, with whom he maintained a direct mercantile intercourse; E, determined, if possible, to exclude the American from the colonial market, instituted an action against him, in the supreme court of the colony, on an obsolete and most impolitic statute of Charles II., prohibiting foreigners from trading in British colonies, and confiscating their goods. By a legal manoeuvre, however, which was perhaps justifiable under the peculiar circumstances of the case, the American applied to the court for time to produce a duly attested certificate of E's conviction as a felon; which, in virtue of a much more recent parliamentary enactment, he professed his determination to plead as a bar to his instituting any action of the kind; and this application being granted by the court, the prosecution was dropped as a matter of course. That an individual, however, who had been himself but very recently restored to the rights and privileges of a British subject—solely through the extreme indulgence of a British governor, dispensing with the just enactments of the
