(369) 
not have granted compensation and thus acknowledged an 
obligation to Columbia while similar relief to others was re- 
fused, without subjecting itself to the charge of gross par- 
tiality and injustice; nor was Columbia at that period in any 
such special favor with the majority in the Legislature as 
would make any such favoritism, for her benefit alone, in the 
least degree probable. I have found no case in which such 
relief was granted for the loss of mere land-claims. In 1797 
a petition was presented by Jacob Wilkins, John Rogers, Wil- 
liam Linn in behalf of the Dutch Reformed Church, and by 
some twenty others, for relief on account of the State’s “* ces- 
sion of lands in Vermont”: it was referred to a committee, 
but failed, like Columbia’s special claim in 1805 and 1806.* 
The trustees in 1814, therefore, had every reason to be- 
lieve that any clazim to compensation would not only be refused, 
but would injure, rather than promote their petition for relief. 
The State, in its distribution of patronage to educational in- 
stitutions in need of it, might grant as a necessary Jounty 
what it must deny as compensation for lost lands —under a 
claim of right thereto. Hence nothing about any “claim” 
or ‘*compensation” for the loss of lands is to be found in the 
petition of 1814. 
The petition as a whole was manifestly framed as a strong 
appeal for the ordznary bounty of the State to aid an educa- 
tional institution in great need of relief. Of the incidental 
circumstances calculated to draw favorable attention, the one 
first mentioned, that Columbia had not received ‘* one fifth 
part of the denefactzons made to a kindred institution,” had no 
relevancy to a claim of compensation, but was very pertinent 
to the distribution of patronage; and the second circumstance, 
the loss of the Vermont land, was not mentioned as a subject 
of claim, or of specific compensation — for none of the neces- 
*In 1786 to 1788 (Act of March 20) a grant of land eight miles square in 
western New York was made to Timothy Church and about Ioo others, as 
compensation for personal injuries and losses of property while living in Ver- 
mont, through their efforts to uphold the authority of New York (Doc. 
Hist. N. Y., 4: 1014, 1027; qto ed., 7é7d., 610, 615; B. H. Hall’s Vt., 542, 
757) —a wholly different case from that of the N. Y. land-claimants. 
