xxii Letter of Transmittal.

similar tax imposed by Parliament a few years later resulted in an insurrection
in the Province. Under the bill as originally introduced there was included a tax
of five shillings on each marriage licence issued, but by a vote of 28 to 19 this
provision was struck from the bill. The Lower House later substituted a tax on
bachelors rated according to their wealth. The land tax was fixed at one shilling
for every hundred acres, with a super-tax of one shilling in the case of Papists;
these taxes were, of course, in addition to the regular quit-rents payable to the
Lord Proprietary. It is to be noted that the Lower House backed down on its
insistence to levy a tax on ordinaries, which had been the cause of a deadlock
between the two houses in previous sessions, but included other explosives in
the bill, which reached the Upper House on April 8th and was returned to the
Lower House on April 15th with a message pointing to more than a dozen
of its provisions which were objected to, and adding that there were still other
items which it might later question.

In all, eighteen messages, usually acrimonious, passed between the two
houses on the subject of this supply bill, and a conference had to be held before
one was finally agreed upon and passed on May 14th. With all the steps in this
dispute we cannot concern ourselves here. The Lower House insisted that the
regular parliamentary practice should be followed and all the objections of the
other house made at the outset, for otherwise it feared that after relinquishing
with reluctance certain of its undoubted rights, demands to give up others might
then be made. The Upper House resented this intimation that its action was a
ruse to involve the other house in a succession of concessions by bringing up new
objections as soon as one set had been disposed of, and on April 19th returned
the bill with its negative. The Lower House then seems to have made certain
trivial changes in the bill, the nature of which are not disclosed, and to have
passed it again on April 23d and sent it back as a new bill, with a message
repeating the reasons for so doing given in a former message, and indulging
in a lengthy quibble as to the use of the word " some," instead of " all " as
applied to the objections which the Upper House might see fit to bring forward
against items obnoxious to that body. The Upper House promptly returned this
second bill with a negative, saying that few of its objectionable features had
been removed, although a new and equally objectionable one, vesting extraordi-
nary powers in a committee to be created to fix the land tax, had been added,
and reminded the Lower House that the Upper House had as much right
to pass upon the various items of a supply bill as the Lower House had to propose
one.

Further changes were made in the once more rejected bill by the Lower
House, and it was passed on April 28th and again sent up as a new bill. The
Upper House rejected this on the grounds that it was substantially the same