MARVIN MANDEL, Governor                       4063

"must not be misleading by apparently limiting the
enactment to a much narrower scope than the body of the
Act is made to compass...." Painter v. Mattfeldt, 119 Md.
466, 474 (1913). In weighing the adequacy of a title,
the courts frequently inquire whether it was sufficient
to put legislators and the public "on notice" of its
intended provision. Dinneen v. Rider, 152 Md. 343, 358
(1927); Quenstedt v. Wilson. 173 Md. 11, 22 (1937). See
generally Everstine, "Titles of Legislative Acts", 9
Maryland Law Review 197 (1948) .

A reading of the title to House Bill 1621 indicates
that its provisions affect Charles County only. No one
reading the title would be put "on notice" that a
substantive change affecting St. Mary's County is made.
In an early case decided by the Court of Appeals, the
title to an Act stated that the Act provided for an
election to be held in the town of Cambridge for the
purpose of determining whether liquor traffic was to be
regulated in Cambridge. In fact, the Act provided that
an entire election district of which Cambridge was but a
part was to be affected, and that liquor traffic was to
be abolished, rather than regulated. The Court of
Appeals stated:

"... There is not the faintest suggestion in the
title to indicate that the body of the Act
contained, under any contingency, a single
provisions prohibiting, in the town of Cambridge,
the sale of liquor by druggists or the compounding
by them of prescriptions whose chief ingredient is
alcohol; and much less is there the most remote
intimation in the title that such a prohibitory
clause, applying to a whole election district beyond
the limits of the town, was contained in the body of
an Act whose title professed that the Act was one to
regulate the sale of liquor merely within the town.
This ... section is, therefore, not germane to the
subject described in that part of the title which we
have been considering; but, on the contrary, it is
distinctly foreign to that subject, and must fall
..." (Emphasis in original). Whitman v. State, 80
Md. 410 (1895).

We conclude that, as was the case with the title
being considered in Whitman, the title to House Bill 1621
does not afford even "the most remote intimation" that
the effect of the Act went beyond Charles County and into
St. Mary's. The title is, therefore, defective, and we
find that portion of House Bill 1621 which purports to
amend Article 2B, Section 25(j) to be unconstitutional.
While we can conclude that the amendment to Section 25(j)
is severable from the balance of the Act (see infra), we
cannot reach the same conclusion as to the various parts
of the amendment to Section 25(j) itself. For if we were