Letter of Transmittal. xi

pressure for funds to support a Provincial military force, and in part because
the anti-Proprietary majority in the Lower House had dwindled to such a small
margin that the popular leaders were fearful that the defeat of the bill in the
lower chamber would be a severe blow to their prestige. These attempts by
the Lower House over a period of five years to introduce a system of taxation
new to the English-speaking world, an income tax levied upon the salaries or
earnings of the larger office-holders and of the professional and mercantile
classes and upon incomes derived from personal property, as well as taxes
levied upon all land holdings, had been put forward and pressed by the popular
party in the Lower House largely as a political measure. It was directed pri-
marily against the Lord Proprietary himself as the largest landholder, and
against the larger office-holders, with no real expectation, and even less wish,
that it become a law, as too many of the members of the Lower House were
themselves extensive landholders with large incomes, who would have been
heavily taxed by its provisions. As an attack upon the prerogative of the Lord
Proprietary it had more popular support than as a tax bill.

Other measures of a controversial character, which had been before recent
assemblies, however, came up again at these two sessions, and still further
increased the ill feeling between the Lower House on one hand and the Governor
and Upper House as representing the Proprietary interest, on the other. Among
these were bills to provide a support for a Provincial Agent in London to repre-
sent the people before the Crown, a perennial measure destined to successive
rejections in the Upper House although warmly espoused by a great majority of
all classes in the Province; the establishment of a college in Annapolis; the
adoption of the Journal of Accounts to meet the ordinary Provincial expenses
which included sundry items in controversy; and various other bills passed by
the Lower House and rejected in the upper chamber appropriating for public
purposes monies derived from licenses and fines claimed by the Proprietary. The
most bitter contest involved the use of licenses from ordinaries or public houses.
For nearly three-quarters of a century the disposition of the license money from
ordinaries had been in dispute, the Proprietary claiming it under his prerogative,
and the Lower House as the right of the public. It was not until 1766 that the
Proprietary finally gave up his claim to it. The dispute as to the use of this
license money, although the amount involved was never large, estimated at £600
annually in 1763, determined the attitude of the two houses towards much pro-
posed legislation of importance. The Lower House also continued to assert its
claim to the powers of the House of Commons in England. For a proper under-
standing of these and other Assembly controversies of the period they must be
studied in connection with the light thrown upon them by such contemporary
records as the Correspondence of Governor Horatio Sharpe (Arch. Md., XXV),