ixxii Introduction.

that the legal status of any laws which had been hitherto questioned should
not in any way be altered by their inclusion in the collection, and that no law
inserted should be altered or strengthened by its inclusion. The committee
also reported that, while it felt that the charge of £300 for eighteen copies was
reasonable, delivery of the printed book should be required within eighteen
months after approval of the material to be included, and that the price to sub-
scribers could be better fixed when the size of the volume as determined by
the number of sheets, now only to be guessed at, was known (pp. 114, 115). On
December 23, 1758 the Lower House concurred in the report of its com-
mittee and referred the matter to the next Assembly for further consideration
(p. 125), but nothing was heard of Bacon or his "Laws" at the 1759 session.
A petition, the nature of which is not disclosed, from Thomas Bacon, clerk,
is mentioned again at the March-April, 1760, session (p. 243).

At the September-October 1760 session a petition from Bacon was once more
read before the Lower House, which on October 11 ordered that he be given
access to the old journals and copies of laws among the Lower House records
for the better revising of the laws for publication, as those in the Provincial
Secretary's office were in an imperfect and confused condition (p. 379). The
house then ordered that a bill be brought in for the publication of the laws,
and by a vote of 22 to 7 decided that this house insert in the bill the names
of all the commissioners, or committees, appointed under the act to col-
lect and approve the laws to be included in the "body" to be printed (p.
383). The bill was brought in and passed by the Lower House on October
15, 1760, and sent to the Upper House where it was immediately rejected
(p. 384). The Lower House then ordered that it be printed in the Mary-
land Gazette. It appeared in the October 30 issue and is reproduced in
the Appendix (pp. 514-516). An examination of certain of its terms
makes it obvious why it was thrown out by the Upper House. Under it a
committee of ten, named by the Lower House in the bill, was entrusted with
supervising the preparation of the collection of laws and with approving those
to be included in it, of which committee five were to be members of the Upper
and five of the Lower House, and of the latter, three, Murdock, Carroll, and
Hammond, were designated "to supervise and correct the Press". The Upper
House obviously resented the selection by the lower chamber of the five mem-
bers of the Upper House who were to serve on the committee of supervision,
and even more that only members of the Lower House were to supervise the
progress of the work through the press.

A final, though ineffectual, attempt was made at the April-May 1761 session
to bring about the publication of Bacon's Laws by a legislative subsidy. A
committee of three appointed by the Lower House to enquire into the re-
vision or printing of previous collections of Maryland laws reported the entries
relating to these as contained in the 1692 and 1715 Assembly journals (pp. 470-
473). The Lower House then ordered that Bacon's "Proposals" for printing a
collection of the laws of the Province "now in force" be entered in its journal
(pp. 479-480). These proposals, although dated 1758, cover other matters