xxii Introduction.

the greatest irritation because of its inability to prevent the Governor, under
the Act of 1715, from calling out the county militia whenever he thought
this necessary. All of these disputes between the two houses are discussed
hereafter in this introduction. They resulted in the exchange of numerous,
lengthy, and bitter, messages between the Lower House on one hand, and the
Governor or the Upper House on the other, which reveal the irreconciliable
differences between the popular and the Proprietary points of view. The
ex parte arguments adduced by each side to support its respective claims are
invaluable sources of information to the students of Maryland constitutional
history of this period. From the legal point of view the advantages in these
discussions were with the Governor, who won the battles on nearly every
issue, but by the refusal of the Proprietary to make concessions to his people
in the end he lost his Province.

These bitter disputes between the two houses at this session prevented the
passage of a Supply act, a conference committee of the two houses having
failed to come to any agreement. Nor was any other legislation of impor-
tance passed. Sharpe on May 13, prorogued the Assembly to meet again on
June 26, but after two postponements he decided to dissolve it and order
the election of a new Assembly, which met in the following October (Arch.
Md. xxxi, 91, 294-295).

As noted elsewhere (p. xlv) an act (No. i) was passed appropriating
£300 for presents to be given the fifty or more Cherokee Indians then on the
frontier, and to pay for the services of a " conductor " and an interpreter
who accompanied some of them to Annapolis, and for their support while there
(pp. 690-691). The petition of William Cromwell, asking payment of £25 16:3
for having acted as the conductor of a party of Cherokees from Winchester,
Virginia, to Fort Frederick, Maryland, was rejected by the Upper House on
April 5, 1758 (p. 476). An act (No. 2) was passed to rectify certain techni-
cal defects in a law passed at the September-December, 1757, session, taxing
the inhabitants of St. George's Parish, Baltimore County, the sum of £550
for completing the furnishings of the church (pp. 691-692). Acts were also
passed (No. 3) to prevent the counterfeiting of the bills of credit or paper
money of Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, the Jerseys, and the three
lower counties on the Delaware (pp. 692-693); and (No. 4) to protect the
interests of orphans in landed estates held by guardians (pp. 693-695). Laws
were passed (No. 5) to strengthen the provisions of a former Supply bill still
in force imposing a duty on horses and liquor brought into the Province
(pp. 695-697); and another (No. 6) to better enforce the liquor provisions
of a former act regulating the importation into the Province from Pennsyl-
vania and the Delaware counties of negroes, Irish Papists, and liquors
(pp. 697-703).

The Assembly which had been elected in September 1757, had now held
four futile sessions in less than a year in a vain attempt to pass a Supply or
Service bill satisfactory to both houses. On August 21, 1758, the Governor,
his patience exhausted, and in the desperate hope of securing a less obdurate
Lower House, asked his Council for an opinion as to the advisability of dis-