almost any inconvenience rather than not vote. Not one in five of the majority will forego his day's labor or even his day's pleasure to vote. Yet the measures which have been eagerly supported by passionate minorities and faintly opposed by languid majorities would have often been ruinous to nations. A primary Assembly in England in 1679 would probably have made it a capital crime ever to have attended mass, and would have trieċ such offenders by a special tribunal with Titus Oates at its head. A primary Assembly in 1743 would very probably have sent Walpole to the scaffold. In each case the majority would have been overawed or indifferent, and the state would have done in haste what every later generation would have repented at leisure.

In a community like Maryland, the first of these evils was sure to be soon felt. At the outset, while the colony was but a single encampment of log huts, all the freemen might easily meet together for the trifling business of the colony. But as the settlements gradually expanded over a wider area, how could the planter leave his corn to be eaten by deer, his cattle to stray in the woods, his swine to be stolen by Indians? Every year the Assembly would have become more and more a little oligarchy of those living at or near the centre of government.

System

One would suppose that the remedy of representation would at once have suggested itself. But before that was adopted a more cumbrous and far less efficient device was tried. In of proxies. 1638 the Assembly met for the second time. Their proceedings, unlike those of the previous session, are recorded. On this occasion those who could not appear in person were allowed to send proxies. If such a system avoids the evils incident to a primary body, it brings with it other evils of a directly contrary kind. It may be bad that an energetic and ever-present minority should have everything its own way. It is worse that energy and constant attendance should count for nothing, and that the voter who delegates his power to another should have as full a share in legislation as the voter who exerts himself to attend.

The
Assembly

The evils of this system were amply illustrated in the events of the year. The Assembly, undeterred by its previous failure, proceeded to enact a set of laws. Of these only the titles remain. This matters the less as it is probable that they closely resembled those which were successfully proposed in the following year.

of 1638.

While the proposals of the Assembly, or rather of a part of it, were under discussion, a rival set of laws was sent out by Baltimore. Apart from the intrinsic merits or demerits of the proposed laws, it was clearly a most serious question whether the initiative in legislation was to belong to the Proprietor or the colonists.

The division which followed illustrated forcibly the evils of the proxy system. The acts sent out by the Proprietor were rejected by thirty-seven votes to eighteen. Doubtless there were proxies on both sides, but in the minority twelve of them were in two hands, those of the Governor and of Councilor Sawyer, who had been lately associated with Hawley and Cornwallis. No better illustration could have been found of the danger to the liberties of the colony involved in this anomalous system.

A compromise was then proposed, apparently by Cornwallis. The Assembly was to reject the laws sent out by the Proprietor. At the same time it was to abandon its own claim to legislation and to pass a formal declaration accepting the laws of England. This proposal, however, seems to have fallen through. The enactments just proposed were carried, forwarded to the Proprietor, and, as before, rejected.

Baltimore's motives throughout the whole of these affairs, as indeed throughout his career, are hard to be understood. He seems first to have asserted a claim to what was practically almost absolute power, then, without any apparent reason, to have abandoned this position, and in a temperate letter empowered his brother as Governor to assent to such laws as should be "concerted with and approved of by the freemen or their deputies." This consent was to be subsequently ratified by the Proprietor himself.

The reference in the letter to the freemen "or their deputies" is a clear proof that Baltimore contemplated the continuance of this most inconvenient and irrational system of a mixed Assembly consisting in part of the freemen themselves, in part of their representatives.

Early in the next year another Assembly was called. Its constitution brought the colonists one step nearer to the system of Assembly representation. Regular writs were issued to the various of 1639. hundreds instructing them to return representatives. Yet after the election one person at least came forward and claimed the right of appearing in person on the ground that he

had voted in the minority, and so was not represented. The claim seems to have been allowed, and nothing could illustrate more forcibly the complex and hybrid system on which this Assembly had been formed. It showed that the logical result of that principle was that in a constituency of fifty, a majority of four-fifths might have two votes and a minority of one-fifth, ten.

This was not the only anomaly in the constitution of the Assembly. The Proprietor claimed, and as it would seem obtained without challenge, the right of summoning members by writ. This claim evidently proceeds from a confusion in the original constitution of the legislature. That an upper chamber should be nominated by the Proprietor was only in accordance with the principles of the English constitution. But that arrangement presupposes a division of the legislature into two chambers. To allow it while the whole body, those summoned by writ and those elected by popular suffrage, sat, voted, and deliberated together, was simply to enable the Proprietor to swamp the representation of the Commons with his own creatures.

Gradual establish

representa

The proceedings of this Assembly were in themselves of sufficient importance to deserve a full notice. But before describing them it will be best to follow out the process by which ment of the machinery of the constitution assumed its final tion. shape. The incongruous combination of a representative with a primary Assembly disappeared three years later. The legislature when it met in 1639 declared by its first act that the Assembly should consist of the Governor and Secretary, those named by special writ, lords of manors, one or two Burgesses from every hundred, and all freemen who had not consented to the aforesaid elections. At the same time it was enacted that Assemblies should be held at least once in every three years.

In the next Assembly the right of personal appearance was in at least one instance claimed and refused. Nevertheless, in 1642 the Governor reverted to the earlier system, and required the freemen of the colony to appear either by themselves or their deputies. Out of one hundred and six persons who obeyed this summons, seventy-two availed themselves of the right to send proxies. One of the first proceedings of the Assembly was to define the constitution of the legislature by limiting the popular representation to the elected deputies, and with this reform the last trace of the earlier system disappears.

It should be noticed that the records of this Assembly throw

DISPUTE WITH VIRGINIA.

291

some light on the social condition of the colony. It is clear that the right of appearing either in person or by deputy extended to all freemen, to all, that is, who were not indented servants. It is also recorded that the number of such freemen was one hundred and eighty-two, of whom seventy-six failed to exercise their rights. Considering the extent of ground which the colony now covered and the importance of its commerce, we may be sure that a considerable number of these hundred and eighty-two were large landed proprietors; and thus we see how insignificant a portion of the community were the small freeholders, who stood between the large planters and their indented servants.

The other anomaly, the right of the Proprietor to add members to the Assembly, endured for some years longer. That it did so is perhaps the best evidence that it was never turned to the pernicious uses of which it was capable. At length, in 1647, the Assembly was divided into two chambers, the lower consisting of the Burgesses, the upper of the Councilors and those specially summoned by the Proprietor. This change finally brought the constitution of Maryland into conformity with that of the mother country and of Virginia.

with Vir

The events, if they can be so called, which have just been recounted are interesting as a study in the development of instituDispute tions; in the eyes of contemporaries they were overginia. shadowed by more stirring matters which absorbed nearly all the energies of the infant community. The struggle with Virginia was the one leading thread which runs through all the early history of the colony, and with which everything connects itself. The hostility between Papist and Puritan, the conflict between the allies of the crown and the allies of the Commonwealth, all blended themselves with this and became in some sort episodes in the contest between the two colonies.

If the grievance had been a merely theoretical one, if Baltimore's patent had only included certain land formally belonging to Virginia, but as yet unoccupied, we may doubt whether the legal possessors would have cared to make good their title for the benefit of unborn descendants against an influential nobleman, the favorite of the king. Unhappily a part of the debatable ground was of special value to Virginia. The Isle of Kent in the Chesapeake Bay was nearly eighty miles north of Virginia, and consequently commanded the Maryland settlements at the mouth of the Bay. In 1631 a certain number of Virginian mer

chants had obtained a special commission from the crown to trade with the natives at Kent Island. Their representative was William Clayborne, a land surveyor by trade, a Councilor for Virginia, at one time Secretary for the colony, and one of those who had opposed Harvey. He appears to have been a resolute, energetic, and somewhat unscrupulous man, and his personal character had no small share in determining the relations between the two colonies. It is not easy to make out what was the precise nature of the settlement on the Isle of Kent, how far it was merely a station for trade, and how far a permanent agricultural community. All we know definitely is that as early as 1625 it had a hundred occupants, that in 1631 it returned a representative to the Virginian Assembly,' and that it was specially valued as a trading station. This being so, it is no matter for wonder that the Virginians at once resented the threatened intrusion. A mere outlying plantation might have been sacrificed, but it is clear that the Isle of Kent was a possession of value to the whole colony, while, moreover, a station for trading with the natives was just the very place where the interference of a rival government was most to be dreaded.

It would be profitless to inquire the precise steps with which the quarrel began. Both parties claimed the place, and both, it is Hostilities clear, were prepared to resort to force in defense of that between claim. In such a case a collision is a mere question of time and opportunity, and whether the disputants be great nations or petty colonies, it is scarcely worth while to discuss which was the aggressor.

the two colonies.

Scarcely had the first Maryland settlers reached the shores of the Chesapeake Bay and chosen the site of their abode, when the first symptoms of hostility were felt. Clayborne was charged. with having alarmed the Indians by telling them that the new colonists were Spaniards. Some faint rumor of that tyrannical race seems to have reached the shores of the Chesapeake Bay, and the dread of their presence put an end for a while to the friendly relations between the settlers and the savages. The latter discovered their error and harmony was restored; but if the interruption of friendship was really due to Clayborne, it transfers the odium of the quarrel from the trespassers to the man who thus forgot the claims of humanity and kinship.

In the spring of 1634 the question of the Isle of Kent was