Letter of Transmittal. xi

existed since 1756, because the Lower House had refused to include in the
Journal a salary for the Clerk of the Council, on the ground that this body
was the creature of the Proprietary and that expenses incurred by the Council
were not properly chargeable to the people. During this decade of deadlock
the number of creditors of the Province had steadily increased, as had the
public debt, and the creditors, especially the unpaid soldiers of the Seven
Years' War, had become more indignant and insistent. There were threats
of mob action at the November-December, 1765, session to force the Upper
House to pass the Journal with the salary for the Clerk eliminated, but as the
Proprietary had instructed the Governor not to recede from the position the
Upper House had taken on the salary question, the Journal failed of passage,
and once more the public debt remained unpaid. It may be added that it was
not until 1766 that a Journal of Accounts was finally adopted after the two
houses had agreed to submit the salary of the Clerk to the arbitration of the
King in Council.

The break between the two houses over the Journal of Accounts again
brought to the fore another controversial question—provision for the support
of a Provincial Agent in London, to be appointed by, and responsible to, the
Lower House alone. This demand by the Lower House had been rejected
repeatedly by the Upper House for many years, but the acquiescence of the
Upper House in the appointment of a special agent in the person of Charles
Garth, a member of the House of Commons, to represent the Province in Stamp
Act matters before the King and Parliament, gave the Lower House good
ground to renew its insistence upon the appointment of an Agent resident in
London to represent the people before the Crown in controversies with the
Proprietary. The Upper House again rejected the bill for the appointment
by the Lower House of an Agent, but just before adjournment suggested two
possible compromises—that each house appoint a separate agent, or that a
joint agent be appointed by both. The Lower House took no notice of these
suggestions.

Other matters long in controversy between the two houses did not come
very much into the open at the 1765 sessions. The journals of the two houses
show, however, that bills, involving such questions as the disposition of license
fees from ordinaries, were passed by the Lower House, rejected in the upper
chamber, and returned without the exchange of such bitter messages as had
passed between them in recent sessions. It may be said in general that nearly
all the bills favored by the Lower House and rejected in the upper chamber
were opposed by the latter body either as threats to the prerogative of the
Proprietary, or, as in case of bills affecting legal procedure, because they tended