xlviii Introduction.

to the Upper House (pp. 236-238). When it reached that house it was read
once and immediately rejected, and returned without comment to the Lower
House (pp. 208-209). Thus for the sixth time the two houses split on the
rock which Sharpe had urged the Lower House to avoid, and the Supply bill
again failed of passage. On April 8, the Lower House ordered that the rejected
bill be printed with the votes and proceedings of that house, and that an allow-
ance to the clerk of the house be included in the Journal of Accounts for enter-
ing it upon its journal (p. 265). It will be found printed on pages 263-306.
It was also printed by order of the Lower House in separate pamphlet form
together with two other rejected bills, viz., the Naturalization bill drawn up
in the Upper House and amended in the lower chamber (pp. 309-313), and
the bill for the relief of landowners about to be unduly taxed under the £40,000
Supply bill of 1756 (pp. 257-262). This Supply bill is an enormously long
one, occupying forty-three printed pages of this volume. It can be compared
with the similar Supply bill that was passed by the Lower House at the
September-December 1757 session and rejected by the Upper House, printed
in full in the preceding volume of the Archives, which it resembles in essential
features, but varies in the arrangement and order of its paragraphs (Arch. Md.
LV, 707-750). Its income tax features will be found on pages 270-271.

On April 9, the day following the rejection by the Upper House of the
Supply bill, the Governor sent a message to the Lower House saying that, as
the Honorable Colonel Howe was returning to New York to-morrow, he would
be glad to know what reply he was to send to General Amherst's letter com-
municated to them at the opening of the session, especially as the day was near
at hand when his Excellency desired that the Maryland forces to be raised be
ready to march (p. 306). To this the house rejoined that in its bill which had
been just rejected by the Upper House it had done everything "consistent with
its constitutional rights" that could be expected from the King's dutiful and
loyal Maryland subjects and could do no more (pp. 308-309). The Gov-
ernor's reply was to prorogue the Assembly until July 7, 1760. Reference to
the Supply bill at this session ends with an address from the Upper House to
the Governor, under date of April 10, in which that house justifies its rejec-
tion of the bill on the grounds that it "is essentially the same with the five
Bills we had in as many Sessions before Dissented to .... and is the same
with that His Majesty's Attorney General in the Opinion Communicated to
General Assembly at the Commencement of this Session held to be Absurd,
unreasonable, against the Duty we owe to the Mother Country .... and to
have a Tendency to erect a Power and Authority in the Lower House which
neither the Crown nor the Parliament would ever suffer them to Exercise"
(pp. 223-224). This reference is, of course, to the opinion given in 1759 by
Charles Pratt, Attorney-General of the Crown, to Frederick Lord Baltimore in
regard to the constitutionality of various measures which the Lower House had
endeavored to force upon the Upper House (pp. 202-204). It is discussed at
length in a later section of this introduction (pp. li-lii).

At the September-October 1760 session of the Assembly, before proceeding
to introduce a Supply bill for His Majesty's Service, the Lower House as usual