Introduction. cv

the May, 1766, session the bill passed the Lower House by a vote of 27 to 19,
several members of the Proprietary party voting for it. This bill, which
dedicated the license fees to the public schools of the counties, was amended
by the Upper House so that the disposition of the fees was left to the Assembly,
which again caused its rejection. At the 1768 session the licensing of hawkers,
peddlers, and petty chapmen was incorporated in the bill, which also regulated
and licensed ordinaries, the Dulany opinion cited in the previous paragraph
obviously covering licenses from both sources.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN IN MARYLAND POLITICS

Attention was called in the introduction to the preceding volume of the
Archives dealing with Assembly affairs for the years 1764-1765 to a war of
pamphleteers waged in the year 1764, in which the Proprietary government in
Maryland was violently attacked, and as ardently defended, by anonymous
writers. Two of these controversial pamphlets are reprinted in that volume
(Arch. Md. LIX, pp. lxix-lxxii, 367-457). The attacking pamphlet, which
bore neither the name of the author nor the place of publication, was entitled
"Remarks Upon a Message sent by the Upper to the Lower House of Assembly
of Maryland—1762", by "A Friend of Maryland", and vigorously reflected
the anti-Proprietary attitude of the Lower House. The defending anonymous
pamphlet, also by "A Friend of Maryland", whose identity has not been
established, was apparently printed in London; it has a very long title which
may be here abbreviated as, "An Answer ... to the Remarks upon a Mes-
sage". There were reasons for suspecting that the "Remarks" came from the
press of Franklin and Hall of Philadelphia, and that Benjamin Franklin him-
self might perhaps have had a hand in its writing, but of this there was no
proof. Since the publication of Volume LIX of the Archives, Lawrence C.
Wroth, an outstanding authority on colonial printing, has pointed out to the
editor that in the original manuscript "Franklin and Hall Work Book, 1759-
1766", now in the New York Public Library, there is a record of a payment
made on July 16, 1764, of £17:6:6 to the firm of Franklin and Hall of
Philadelphia by Thomas Ringgold for printing 500 copies of the pamphlet
"Remarks upon a Message sent by the Upper to the Lower House of As-
sembly". Ringgold, a wealthy merchant of Chestertown, Kent County, and
one of the leaders of the popular party in the Lower House, who was a cor-
respondent of Franklin, may have had a hand in the preparation of the
"Remarks", or, what is more likely, he may merely have been the intermediary
who carried the manuscript to Philadelphia to the printers and later paid the
bill. That Franklin's firm printed the pamphlet is thus established, but it is
still a question whether or not he had a hand in its writing. That he was at the
time actively engaged in an attempt to discredit before the Crown the Pro-
prietary government of the Penns in Pennsylvania, would have been an incen-
tive to him also to attack the Proprietary government of the Calverts in
Maryland. That Franklin had on previous occasions acted as an informal agent
in London for the Lower House of Assembly of Maryland is of course an
established fact. The interested reader will find a full discussion of these