gradually to cover, thus familiarizing ourselves with the minds of the men who made history, as well as of the times which made men, we, representing a section of the great whole, and a section which was among the clearest voices in the call of liberty, and the bravest to maintain it in the field of arms, feel that in this study of a period, in which in all sections a sense of common country fills us with a common pride, our first duty as well as pleasure leads us to the consideration of what we personally represent-Maryland. The speakers who will succeed me will follow the brilliant careers of the heroes whose names are the glory of the State; and trace the influence of the Province, the most royalist in formation, the most of a diminutive monarchy, in fact, of any of the colonial settlements, in the cause of Independence, and the establishment of a Republic. There remains, therefore, to me merely to sketch out the early character and feelings of this community in order to gain an insight into, and understand the spirit of Maryland before Lexington.

From the very outset of the Colony's settlement, independence had been a dominant sentiment. Designed as a place of refuge for English Catholics, yet from the earliest periods religious tolerations were proclaimed and practiced. Indeed, Maryland claimed the honor of being one of the first governments in which liberty in matters of faith was established by law. The charter itself of Maryland granted it greater independence from the parent country than any other colony in the New World. It made it, it is true, a sort of feudal State, giving its Proprietary Governor empire over the soil, and rights equal to those exercised in many principalities. But feudalism was too rapidly falling into decay in the Old World for these privileges to be of much moment in the New. And if almost principality the Province of Terra Mariae was, it was in many ways an independent one. The laws of the provincial assembly, which received the assent of the Proprietary, were not subject to revision to the crown. Indeed so little rights had the English sovereign retained over the affairs of the Colony that express stipulations provided that neither he nor his heirs, nor his successors, should ever, at any time

thereafter, set any custom or imposition tax whatever upon the inhabitants; thus conferring on the Province exemption from English taxation forever. Strange irony of fate that the monarch who thus bound in perpetuity his successors to respect an authority conceded his by Divine right should, by the dictates of the mob, have been the central figure in the tragedy at Whitehall.

The very detachment of the Province of Maryland from the parent government which protected the authority and measures of the Royal Governors in the other Colonies forced the Lords Proprietary to depend for strength upon the attachment of their lieges. Thus great as seemed the prerogatives and authority given the Proprietary, the real power of that form of government depended upon union between the government and the people; and, as the affairs of the Colony developed, the Crown, jealous of the very power it had conferred, was always ready to favor the people in any effort to limit the authority of the intermediate sovereign.

Started under the generous patronage of Lord Baltimore, Maryland had improved more in the first months of her existence than several of the older Colonies had in some years, but she was not destined to long enjoy this calm. Only a few years after the company, consisting chiefly of gentlemen of fortune and respectability under Leonard Calvert, had landed on the island of St. Clements in March, 1634, and established on the main land the settlement of St. Mary's, the life of the Colony became a stormy one. In 1609, the second charter of Virginia had extended its limits two hundred miles north of Old Point Comfort, thus including what subsequently formed the State of Maryland, and Clayborne, who had first appeared in the country as the surveyor of the London Company, seeing the advantages in fur trading it presented, had made his settlement on Kent Island, and in defiance of the charter issued to Acilius Calvert, second Lord Baltimore, on June 20, 1683, refused to acknowledge, himself subject to the new government. Though finally expelled with his most active adherents, his influence was constantly employed in disturbing the Colony, and when the confusion of the revolution

in England and the gathering cloud of revolutionary doctrines shadowing Europe had extended to the feudal Proprietary Government, weakening its influence, his rebellion sufficed to drive, for a time, the Governor of Maryland from the Colony. The Restoration of the Stuarts saw Philip Calvert, the Proprietary Deputy, recognized; but the spirit of revolt was not dead, it had been lulled only for the moment. Hardly were the Proprietaries again established than the dissensions of sects-ingratitude indeed to the Colony which as early as 1649 had passed the celebrated Toleration Act-broke out. The hereditary rights of the Proprietary were assailed, as well as his religion, and his officers were deposed and Puritans appointed by the Parliamentary Commissioners to govern the Province. Only after several years' contest was the Proprietary Government re-established, to be again disturbed in 1688, when upon the final overthrow of the Stuarts in England, the deputies of Lord Baltimore having failed to proclaim William and Mary, the disaffected Protestants revolted, again overthrowing the feudal lord. Maryland was then taken directly under the government of the Crown; the Church of England was established, and disabilities imposed upon Roman Catholics; and the Province remained a royal Colony until the death of the third Lord Baltimore in 1714, when his son, a Protestant, was recognized Proprietary. From that time until the Revolution, the colony remained under the government of the Baltimores.

Its territorial difficulties, however, still continued. Its original charter had included all the present State of Delaware and a large part of Pennsylvania, and from the Maryland Grant conflicting with that made to Willian Penn arose the controversy which began in 1682, and was settled only in 1760 by the decision of the Privy Council, and the ultimate establishment in 1763-67 of what was to play such a prominent part in American History-the famous "Mason and Dixon's line." Nor was this all that engrossed the Colonists. In the contest which ended the French dominion in America, Maryland took an active part. Braddock's expedition against Fort Duquesne, 1754-58, kept the western part of the State in such

constant terror that numbers of the inhabitants removed to Baltimore and various coast towns. Maryland, like most southern Colonies, had no considerable villages; the inhabitants were settled on large plantations.each one of which was a small world in itself, and the center of a marked refinement and culture. Aristocratic as was the feeling engendered by these miniature kingdoms, and royalist, and jealous of prerogative as was the Proprietary form of government, while it did not encourage the spirit of popular liberty, it yet treated it with consideration and attention. In Europe the general spirit of revolution was the crisis of centuries of repression, the breaking loose of long pent passions, and was therefore marked by fierce revenge, hesitating at no crime, nay eager for blood and destruction. In America, whose youth, perhaps, precluded her having as yet the traditions of woes to avenge, and the burning sense of tyrannies, and social and political errors and misfortunes; perhaps, too, the comparative isolation of the Colonists in the vast country they had come to feel their own and the common hardships of colonization had made class distinction vaguer and less tense, and the new spirit spread on steadily, but almost unconsciously, at first, as the development of advanced systems of liberty. So little did the Colonists sympathize with the mob idea of revolution that during the long years in which diverse tax and revenue bills ignored and insulted their chartered rights, their conservatism suggested only remonstrance. They had no desire of separation from the parent country-all they wanted was representation and a fair hearing. By the voice of their own assemblies, the Colonists had willingly granted supplies and men to the French and Indian War, so that the revival of the idea of a Stamp Act in 1763, as well as the enforcement of the Navigation Act, and rendering null and void the Two Penny Act, was a direct affront to them. It was not so much against taxation that the Americans protested, as against the manner in which it was imposed. They requested that the bill might be given to their assemblies to obtain the consent of the Colonies, and not be passed without allowing them the consideration of what affected themselves. But the result of their opposition tended

only to the introduction in the bill of certain bounties to the Provinces, and the appointment of many prominent Americans as stamp officers, the English Government hoping by means of indulgences granted, and the nomination of Colonists themselves to represent the act, to avoid the chief question at issue, and reconcile the country to the enforcement of the bill. Though the full meaning and limitations of the proposed changes were not thoroughly realized, many far-sighted men felt a growing alarm as to the results, fearing further taxation. A letter from Calvert to Lieutenant Governor Sharpe alludes to the unexpressed policy of the English ministry in these terms: "Last year the first stone was laid, this year another, and will be succeeded by every ministerial builder until the whole American structure of their folly is, by the mother country, completed on them." Another of his letters mentions that in the protests made against the act, the charter of Maryland was referred to, and the clause under which special exemption was claimed for it was read, but that the decision was that in public emergency that Province was subject to taxation as well as the other Colonies. Even when, notwithstanding constant remonstrances and petitions, the act was passed in 1765, no thought of forcible resistance was dreamed of in England or by the Colonial authorities. The plan of taxation had been received in America with dismay; brilliant and fiery speeches had been made in the declaration of colonial rights; and finally the non-importation resolutions were framed. But to be effective they had to be general, and for the moment, this necessity seemed to check resistance. The realization of it was, however, the first great step in the movement towards union among the Colonies. Non-importation sentiment in Maryland was so strong that Lieutenant Governor Sharpe wrote in that year: "The people will go on upon manufactures." The restrictions and prohibitions which followed these displays of the Colonists' feelings produced general discontent, but as acts of absolute resistance were isolated cases, the Governor of Maryland was led to believe that popular agitation was subsiding, and reported in June, 1765, "that the resentment of the Colonists would prob