xxxvi Introduction.

respectively eight, seven, and six prisoners with six weeks provisions for
them (pp. 312-313, 362-363). The Lower House on October 7 resolved that
it would make provision for transporting these French prisoners to England,
and voted 15 to 14 to use for this purpose £150 current money to be taken
out of "the money repaid in the Loan Office by Virtue of the £6,000 [Supply]
Act" of 1754, and the Governor was so notified in an address (pp. 371, 372).
A bill along these lines was drawn up in the Lower House, passed, and sent
to the Upper House (p. 376). Here it was amended so as to allow a commission
of five per cent to the commissioners appointed under the act, for their trouble
in executing it (p. 346), but the Lower House refused to accept the bill thus
amended and it failed of passage (p. 381).

Various petitions of a private character were presented at this meeting;
some of them had already come before previous sessions. No petitions for the
relief of "languishing prisoners" for debt were presented at this meeting, al-
though action upon several such petitions had been referred to the "next as-
sembly" at recent sessions. The failure to introduce the usual bill for the relief
of prisoners for debt was doubtless due to the realization that the same reasons
that prevented the two houses agreeing upon a bill at the November-December
1758 session would again prevent its passage (p. xxii). Hugh Corrigan and
Thomas Rolles, soldiers enlisted in 1757 in the Maryland service, who had been
taken prisoners by the French and sent to the Mississippi and later to Old
France, asked some recompense for their services and sufferings (p. 339). The
Rev. John Eversfield, rector of St. Paul's Parish, Prince George's County, peti-
tioned for the passage of a bill to cut the entail upon certain lands (p. 340), but
no action was taken upon it. A number of tobacco inspectors in Somerset and
Worcester Counties petitioned for allowances for past services and additions
to their present salaries (pp. 340, 359). Mary, widow of Tobias Stansbury of
Baltimore County, petitioned the Assembly for legislation to further the settle-
ment of her husband's estate by the sale of land for the payment of certain
debts, and the Lower House appointed a committee of three to inquire into
the facts (pp. 209, 211, 368). Legislative relief to the widow was not granted,
however, until the April 1762 session.

Action upon petitions from inhabitants of Baltimore County asking for,
or opposing, the removal of the county seat from Joppa to Baltimore Town,
which had been referred at the last session of the Assembly, again came up
at this session for consideration. After several postponements, on October 9
the. Lower House by a vote of 20 to 13 again decided to defer consideration
of the matter until the next session (p. 376). But it was not until 1768, how-
ever, that Baltimore Town was made the county seat.

The Governor prorogued the Assembly on October 15 to meet again the
second Monday in March, 1761 (p. 385), but it was again prorogued later,
and did not meet until April 13, 1761. This session was productive of little
legislation of importance. Of the eight laws enacted, six were merely con-
tinuances of old laws, which were now about to expire by time limitation.
It did, however, pass the bill referred to in a previous paragraph to "ease" the
landholding inhabitants by postponing the payment for two years of the addi-