x Preface.

This personal reference is made to show how continuous has been the edi-
torial policy of the Archives from the beginning to the present day. The
present editor, furthermore, had the care of preparing volume 18 of the
Archives, containing the Revolutionary muster rolls, and so is not now taking
up the work for the first time. That he may carry on the series as success-
fully as his predecessors and make the future volumes as useful to students
as the former ones is the hope with which the work has now been assumed.

The method of publication has been in general the same as in the past. A
new typography places a little more matter upon a page without making it
difficult to read. The days of the session have been added as side notes for
greater clearness. The topical index has been constructed so as to show the
session in which the various subjects were discussed, and the legislative his-
tory of every act. Messages and other documents occurring in the Proceed-
ings of either house are printed only once, in the Upper House Journal, a ref-
erence thereto being made in the Lower House Journal at the proper place.
This enables much more material to be placed in a volume and will not seri-
ously inconvenience scholars.

In general, we possess good manuscripts for this period. The Lower
House Journal for 1727 is an exception. Of it we possess two fragments,
the one contains the first and last few pages of the Proceedings; the other
lacks the pages altogether and, at some distant period, was used as a base for
a flower pot, the grains of earth from it still adhering to the paper in some
places. The paper of most of the upper half of the manuscript has, in con-
sequence, rotted away and entirely disappeared, so that the manuscript is quite
fragmentary.

In 1718, Andrew Bradford, in Philadelphia, printed for Evan Jones, the
Annapolis bookseller, a Body of the Laws, and in 1719 the same persons pre-
pared and printed the Session Laws. In 1726, William Parks settled in
Annapolis and published his compilation of Statutes. This he followed by
an annual publication of Session Laws beginning with 1727. In these pub-
lications the text of no private Acts is included. Both of the previous editors
failed to consult these sources. The manuscript volumes which contained the
Statutes of the period have been lost, and in the recent volumes of the Archives
only such Statutes are printed as were in force in 1765, and were, therefore,
accessible in Bacon's great compilation. An examination of these additional
sources discloses the text of a large number of additional Statutes, which are
printed as an appendix to this volume. Our thanks are due to the Library
of Congress for permission to have photostatic copies made of the volumes
of Statutes which are in that Library.