598 THE CHANCELLOR'S CASE.—1 BLAND.

and had declared should be sacred; they felt the necessity of hav-
ing it distinctly understood, that it was not their intention, directly,
or indirectly, to plight the faith of the State for the payment of any
salary which might burthen and embarrass its finances after the
return of peace. Accordingly, when they fixed the salaries of all
officers upon the high nominal scale of the year 1780; and the
Chancellor's salary, as we have seen, was fixed at twelve thousand
five hundred pounds; the General Assembly resolved: '' That what-
ever salaries may be given to the officers of the civil list, in conti-
nental currency, shall be subject to the control of the General
Assembly, and shall stand no longer than till the further order
of the said General Assembly. " Votes & Pro. H. Del. 24th Decem-
ber, 1779.

It may then be safely assumed, as a fact incontrovertibly estab-
lished , by the acts of the government, and the history of the times,
that, whatever may have been the intentions or the wishes of the
General Assembly, during the first nine years of the Republic, it
was utterly impracticable, within that time, to comply with that
provision of the Declaration of Rights, which requires the Legis-
lature to secure to the Chancellor a salary during the continuance
of his commission. But, however strongly and clearly this may be
deduced from the facts and circumstances of those times; yet if it
rested on deduction only, and there were, in all that period, no
express declarations of the wishes, understanding, and intention
of the Legislature to be met with, there might, perhaps, be found,
somewhere, room to urge a cavil, or to press an inference, that the
Declaration of Rights had been construed to allow the Legislature
a discretionary power over judicial salaries; that it allowed them
to temporize, and to dimmish at pleasure, the salaries of the Chan-
cellor and Judges. But the public acts, the repeated solemn mes-
sages, and the unequivocal language of the two branches of the
General Assembly, have absolutely and positively precluded every
doubt and cavil upon the subject.

* At November Session, 1782, the Senate, on the 11th of
638 December, sent to the House of Delegates the following
message:—"Gentlemen—The bill entitled, an Act to settle and
pay the civil list, and the other expenses of civil government, may
be considered by you as a money bill, to which our assent or dis-
sent only can be given; and as you might have deemed it improper
in us to make any alteration, we have returned it with a negative;
we might otherwise have offered such amendments as would have
met with your approbation; we are therefore under the necessity
of communicating to you, by message, the reasons of our dissent.

"You will readily believe, gentlemen, that we do not mean to
leave the officers of government unprovided for; on the contrary,
we would willingly bestow upon them liberal, though not profuse
salaries; but when the weight of taxes, already so severely felt by