Introduction. ixxi

The committee also reported that Benjamin Young, late Naval Officer of
the Pocomoke District, had been dilatory in making remittances to the London
trustees to the amount of f 147—1—3 1/4. A committee of the Lower House was
appointed to request the Governor to bring suit against Young's bonds (pp.
477-478), but as his brother-in-law, Walter Dulany, a member of the com-
mittee which had discovered the irregularities in the accounts of the naval
officers, at once paid the amount due by Young, an attempt made shortly
afterward in this house to remove him as Naval Officer, failed by a vote of
29 to 7 (p. 478). The joint committee of the two houses also found that
the accounts of the Loan Office were so badly kept that since 1757 the clerk
had not entered any of the accounts of the several Naval Officers.

The report shows that there was then in the trustees' hands to the account
of the Province £27,000 of the Capital Stock of the Bank of England
which had been bought by them at a cost of £36,245 sterling. The joint com-
mittee criticized the trustees for allowing £6,000 to accumulate and "lie dead"
over a five year period because they considered the stock at around 119 too
high for purchase on account of the uncertainty of its price "untill a good
Peace be attained". The committee did not approve of this speculation in
price trends and calculated that the sinking found would have been better off
by £517—10—0, through interest gained, had the stock been purchased as
the money was received.

PUBLICATION OF BACON'S LAWS.

The proposed codification and publication by the Reverend Thomas Bacon of
a printed collection of Maryland laws had been before the Assembly since 1753,
and has been referred to at length in the introduction to the previous
volume of the Archives (Arch. Md. LV, li-lii). A petition from Bacon ask-
ing "encouragement for his trouble" in compiling the laws of the Province
which he proposed to print was again presented to the Upper House at the
October-November 1758 session, and referred by that body to the consideration
of the Lower House (pp. 7, 27), but nothing further was done about it at
that meeting.

At the second session the matter again came up for consideration, and the
petition was presented by Bacon to the Upper House on November 29, 1758,
where it was promptly sent to the lower chamber (p. 45). There it was re-
ferred on December 16 to a committee of nine headed by Walter Dulany (p.
107). Bacon submitted the proposal to this committee that he would deliver
eighteen copies of the "Bodies of Laws" for the use of the public (i. e., the
public authorities) for £300 current money, and that the work would be sold
to subscribers paying their subscriptions in advance at the rate of forty
shilling a copy. The committee reported to the house on December 20 that
publication of a collection of the laws under the plan proposed would be of
great public utility, but recommended that three gentlemen be first appointed
under an act of the Assembly to go over all the petitioner's records with him
so as to determine what laws are now actually in force; and that a clause be
added to the bill authorizing the proposed publication which would declare