xxviii Letter of Transmittal.

No attempt has been made in this summary of Assembly Proceedings to
present other than a mere outline of some of its more important activities.
Especial emphasis has been laid upon matters of political and economic im-
portance which resulted in increasing friction between the people and the
Proprietary until the final break came. Taxation and privilege in its various
forms were largely responsible for the rift between them, a rift which began
to widen rapidly during the years covered by this volume. To these must be
added another factor, more personal in character. All the evils inherent in non-
resident landlordism were to be found in the relations which developed between
Frederick, the Proprietary, and the people of his Province. Selfish, frivolous,
and with little or no feeling of responsibility towards the people of Maryland,
he not only did not take the trouble to visit it and establish personal contact
with its people, but completely ignored the advice of the level-headed Sharpe
to make voluntarily, concessions which an indignant people later forced from
him. To understand properly the trouble between the Lower House and the
Proprietary, as represented by the Upper House and the Governor, it is also
necessary to examine the Proceedings of the Council' and the Sharpe Corre-
spondence for the period, where we find disclosed the motives and policies of
the Proprietary government. It is obvious that the conflict of interests between
people and Proprietary was responsible for a condition of the public mind which
in the next decade was to render it especially intolerant of the measures em-
ployed by the British Government that brought about the American Revolution.
In the preparation of the material for this volume the editor has had some
assistance from Miss Lucy Harwood Harrison in transcribing certain portions
of the copy, which for various reasons were not made by photostatic repro-
ductions of the original manuscript. He is glad that Miss Harrison, who has
just resigned as a member of the staff of the Maryland Historical Society after
half a century of service, has had a hand in the preparation of this, the fiftieth
volume, as she has had in the case of its forty-nine predecessors. The care-
fully prepared index is the work of Miss Elizabeth Mann.

The next volume of the Archives will contain the Proceedings of the Court
of Chancery from 1669, when its records were first kept separately from the
Proceedings of the Provincial Court, down to the year 1684, covering the period
embraced in the first old liber of the Chancery Court series.

Respectfully submitted,

SAMUEL K. DENNIS,
J. HALL PLEASANTS,
JOHN M. VINCENT,

Committee on Publications.