ALL AMENDMENTS TO THE CLOSE OF THE SESSION OF 1899 New fork State. Statulis COMPILED AND EDITED BY EDWARD L. HEYDECKER OF THE NEW YORK BAR, AUTHOR OF MECHANICS LIEN LAW IN FOUR VOLUMES. VOL. I. ALBANY, N. Y.: 1900. 1 PREFACE. THE term" Revised Statutes " has become so familiar to the people of New York, to laymen as well as to bench and bar, and has seemed to be so much an integral part of our constitutional and legal development, that it comes to us as a shock to be told that the "Revised Statutes" no longer exist. Yet this is true; only a fragment now remains on the statute book, and that fragment will speedily disappear with the completion of the new revision. We must now speak of the "General Laws of New York" where we used to quote the "Revised Statutes." The work of the revisers of 1828 was well done. Every year that has passed since then has proved this, and the adoption of similar codes under various names in the other states also testifies to its value. But here in New York, the state where the idea of the Revised Statutes originated, the successive legislatures failed to preserve the harmony of the scheme of revision, and each year witnessed the enactment of independent statutes, containing provisions of law which should have been embodied in the Revised Statutes as amendments to the existing provisions. Thus in the period between 1828 and 1890, through this indifference and carelessness of the legislature, the original Revised Statutes were covered up and almost lost to sight by this great mass of undigested laws which were put upon our statute books each year. Editors struggled against this tendency and they have given us nine different editions of the Revised Statutes, in which they have most skillfully tried to collate and distribute these independent acts according to the original scheme of the revision of 1828. We went on calling these unofficial compilations the "Revised Statutes" until 1889, when the legislature at last realized the pressing need of a new revision and organized the Statutory Revision Commission for this purpose. They planned a revision in 51 chapters, and beginning with 1890 have reported and the legislature has enacted 46 chapters of the 51. Of the five missing chapters, the commission at different times has reported four, and the fifth (the Civil Service Law, Chap. 370 of 1899), while not formally reported as Chapter XXIII., was drafted or approved by the Commission. iii |