1 74 Assembly Proceedings, October 6-November 4, 1724.

L. H. J.

to invert the Order and End of your Office of Counsellors
You are pleasd to say in your last message that your
not giving in to our measures concerning the Oath has
drawn that Calumny on you. We say we esteem it no ways
necessary for faithfull Counsellors to know what will please
their prince before they give their advice &c Which tho' we
Spoke Generally of such as Studied rather to please than to

Serve, you are pleas'd to lay claim to as part of yuur Char-
acter and call it a Calumny thrown on you by us and we find
because we give you our opinion of what good Consequence
your Communicating to his L^pp your Sense of our Resolves
might have been you take that as a Calumny & a Charge of
Neglect for not advising his L^pp on the late Address We hope

p. 185

in all this there is not the least appearance of Calumny, but
if your Honours are pleas'd to call our reasonings with you by
such names as you are displeas'd at we must leave you to your
liberty who best know how to describe your Selves and
Actions.
We did not Charge your Honours with having had the ad-
dress for it was not directed to you, we only Supposed you to
be acquainted with it, which though you were not Judicially as
a House, yet the most of you were in a private way, and every
member might have been, for it was Entred at the end of the
Journall of this House which was return'd to the Secretary
to be Copied and sent to England, and now remains publick
Record. But as our Message only Menconed That if when
your Hon^rs were acquainted with the address you had then
appriz'd his L^pp &c. We desire you to consider how Impos-
sibilities are thereby made part of your Duty, or what In-
stances you have of our forgetting ourselves, or of any precip-
itancy or Sanguinity in the pursuit of what you Say we never
once considered, for we only Suppos'd it might have been of
use to his L^pp for you to have apprized him when, and not
before you were acquainted with the Address
We heartily wish we were as Good masters of policy &
prudence of Government as you think yourselves to be; we
should not then have called that part of the oath an Innovation
that was Enacted in the Reign of Edward the 3^d nor have
waited long for the opinion of the best Lawyers in England
concerning what was most agreeable to the constitucon and
publick Weal of Maryland, as you propos'd in your former,
tho' you deviate in the present message, in this particular; as
well as forgetting that your objections to the Oath was in
points that you do not now mention and Since the oath as you
now propose is Exactly the same Words that M^r Attorney
Generall propos'd, Saving that you Transpose the word Rea-