110 



THE PREDECESSORS OF THE 



object on the part of Government being to give, by virtue of 

 the power vested in it by Parliament, as great a local extent 

 to the jurisdiction of the new Court as it well could, though 

 it had certainly taken a range not intended by the Legislature, 

 and had given more than the Court could have contended 

 for. 73 



No one, however, objected to it as an order defining the 

 limits of the jurisdiction of the Court, which it was its profes- 

 sed object to define, but when it came to the question whether 

 it did not operate to extend the assessment which the Justices 

 of the Peace were empowered to levy by 33 Geo. Ill, c. 52, 

 the lawyers, several of whom appear to have owned houses 

 at some little distance from the Black Town, were strenuous 

 in their objections. Conspicuous among them was Mr. Justice 

 Sullivan, who had been the Advocate- General at Madras when 

 the order in question was made, and was, in all probability, 

 the person by whom it was framed. He refused to pay the 

 assessment upon a house belonging to him in the village 

 of Tanampettah, and upon a warrant of distress being issued, 

 and the amount distrained, he brought an action of trespass 

 against the Justices. That action was discontinued on his 

 death by his executors, but a similar one was brought a few 

 years afterwards by Mr. Compton (afterwards Sir Herbert 

 Compton, Chief Justice of Bombay) upon a like ground with 

 reference to a house belonging to him in the same village, 

 and it was then decided that although the assessment com- 

 menced in 1793, and the house in question had not been 

 included till 1809, when the houses, buildings, and grounds 

 without the Black Town of Madras, and within the limits 

 denned in the order of the 2nd November 1798, were for the 

 first time assessed, the order did involve assessment as a 

 consequence, however little, in contemplation to such an extent 



73 Compton v. Gahagan, Strange' s Notes of Cases at Madras, vol. ii, p. 8. 



