LETTER OF TRANSMISSION.
BALTIMORE, June 1, 1923.
To the Maryland Historical Society:
GENTLEMEN :
Your Committee on Publication has the honor to submit the Forty-Second
Volume of the Archives of Maryland, containing the Proceedings and Acts of
the General Assembly of the Province at the Sessions held from 1740 to 1744.
The text of the volume is taken from the manuscript volumes of journals
and laws deposited by the State with the Society and from the contemporarily
printed Session Laws.
The Session of July 1740 was the third one of the Assembly elected in 1739,
which is apparently the forty-fifth one in the Provincial History.
The splendid and accurate work done by Mr. Lawrence C. Wroth in his
" History of Printing in Colonial Maryland," which was published in 1922,
renders any bibliographical discussion of printed " Votes and Proceedings of
the Lower House " or " Session Laws " unnecessary.
These printed " Votes " have not been carefully collated, but they have been
examined with sufficient care to discover that at times, and intentionally, they
omit passages which are found in the manuscript Journals. At other times,
however, they enable corrections to be made in the manuscript Journal. Thus
in the division recorded on page 101, Courts is recorded as voting on both
sides of the question. The " Votes " show that Joseph Hall, whose name stood
next to that of Courts on the roll call, voted in the negative, and the printer,
discovering the mistake in the Journal, probably corrected it from a checked
roll of the House.
The controversies between the Governor as the representative of the Pro-
prietary on the one hand and the Lower House upon the other, are often tedious
to read, and yet, because of these controversies we find that Oliver's words
approve themselves as true: " Every act, word and proposal of every negotia-
tion was suspect by the other side.
" Little things not worth a second thought, the small blunders of obscure
officials, old wives' grievances, and the absurd and unintended wrongs done by
pompous men, elevated themselves into national questions and became the food
and nourishment of disputants upon constitutional and legal right." (Life of
Alexander Hamilton, p. 27.)
Francis Bacon, in his Life of Henry VII (edited by J. R. Lumby, pp. 61
and 74), wrote that: "The lasting fruit of Parliament, which is good and
wholesome laws, did prosper, and doth yet continue to this day "; and again,
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