THE FIRST STATE THAT GAVE FREE RELIGION.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume II, Issue 69, 22 August 1874, Page 12

THE FIRST STATE THAT GAVE FREE RELIGION.

The • London Telegraph ' of April 15, had the following interesting article on the State of Maryland, and tho long lawsuit that has continued for 241 years, and still is unable to define the State boundaries :—: —

" When an American gentleman wrote one of the most successful national or quasi-national songs of our own time, and addressing • Maryland, my Maryland ! ' informed that personified State that « the despot's heel ' was on her ' shore,' he would have considered it impertinent if any old lawyer had informed that it was impossible to say where the aforesaid shore began or ended. The State is one of the oldest and most respectable in the Union, and, strangely enough, irs exact boundaries are unsettled down to the present day. It was founded, as everybody knows, in the reign of Charles 1., by Lord Baltimore, a Roman Catholic nobleman, and was mainly colonized by gentlemen of his creed; but everybody does not know the singular fact that it was the first, and, for many years, the only, State, in America where persons of all creeds, without exception, were treated •with toleration, like Sterne's Negress, the expatriated Papists at that particular time had ' suffered persecution and had learned mercy.' .Early in the life of the colony it found itself engaged in a law suit with Virginia as to the proper frontiers of the two States, and when England engaged in civil war the Marylanders, mainly Cavaliers, and the Virginians, principally Roundheads, found in this dispute a ready excuse for outrages and retaliatory raids. After the independence of America the quarrel still went on, though transferred to the law courts, and a commission appointed in 1872, to make a final adjustment, gave up the questions as a bad job. They examined old witnesses who had been ' ducked ' or ' whipped ' to make tbem remember the old bounds — aids to memory familiar in our old parochial historics — but as the whippers and duckers belonged to one of the disputant States the evidence was invalidated. Taxpayers were produced who had been called upon to pay by the collectors of both jurisdictions, and who refused to pay either ; this is credible. But we hesitate to accept, without further proof, the statement that taxpayers were examined who asserted that they hud paid taxes to both States. ' There is no euch man,' or if there did exist on any part of the earth a man meek enough to pay tuxes twice over he could not possibly be a Yankee. The law suit still goes on ; it is now in its 241 st year ; and unless a compromise breaks out we do not see why it should not go into the twentieth century, and usefully impress young-America with the fact, now faintly accepted rather than believed^ that once upon a time there wore no Presidents and no Stars and Stripes, and that questions 1 ci ween Maryland and Virginia were referred not to Washington, but to the privy Council of the King."

During the month of March last 221 sailing vessels and 19 sroamitfi were reported up wrecked;