Preface.                    ix

      up. To settle the practical side of the question, an act was passed

      leaving it optional with the taxpayer to pay thirty pounds of tobacco, or

      four shillings in money, per poli; but the act expressly disclaimed any

      intention of determining the validity of the Act of 1702. The Revolu

      tion settled the matter in another way, and the validity of the Act of

      1702 remains res non adjudicala to the present day.

        The standing dispute about the Pennsylvania boundary took an

      additional complication. William Penn, not contented with his grab of

      a great strip of Maryland lying south of the fortieth parallel of latitude

      (which was expressly included in Baltimore's charter of 1632, and as

      expressly excluded from Penn's charter of 1681) had, in 1682, obtained

      from James, then Duke of York, a grant of the territory now forming

      the State of Delaware, which was also included in the Maryland charter,

      which fixed the eastern boundary of the Province at the Delaware river

      and bay, andthe Atlantic ocean. Even had it not been in the charter,

      it was not the Duke's to give, as it was not in his patents. But Penn

      was a favorite of James, and with all his tender conscience and fine

      professions made no scruple of asking for and receiving stolen goods.

      Baltimore strongly protesting against this high-handed action, James,

      then King, took a course for which perhaps he found a warrant in one

      of those actions of King David which we least care to remember.

        David, we are told, deceived by the greedy Ziba's flatteries and lies,

      gave him the lands of the prince Mephibosheth. When the deception

      was made clear to him, instead of revoking his grant and hanging the

      liar, he divided the land between them.

        So James ordered the peninsula (for the whole of which Penn had

      asked) to be equally divided between the lawful owner and the robber,

      by a line running north and south to the latitude of Cape Henlopen.

        One would have supposed that the seizure of three counties of an

      other man's land in addition to his already enormous possessions would

      have satiated even Penn's rapacity; but it was not so. He planned to

      extend his southern boundary still further, and for this purpose had a

      map prepared to be submitted to the King and Council in which Cape

      Henlopen was displaced some fifteen miles to the south. But as all the

      maps (for instance Herrman's of 1660) showed Cape Henlopen where

      it is now and always has been, they invented an imaginary “Cape In

      lopen” which no one ever heard of, and this, they said, was the real

      name of the upper cape, and “Henlopen " that of the lower [p. 375].

      Penn did not live to see his title confirmed, but his descendants did.

      It is needless to add that Cape Henlopen refused to be moved; and the