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 create freehold estates, he was given the express right to establish a mediæval system in the New World by granting manors to vassal lords subject to feudal obligations. These high and extensive powers were, however, tempered by the provision that laws should be made with the consent of the freemen or their representatives. Before this significant document could be signed by the king, the first Lord Baltimore died and the parchment duly sealed passed to his heir, Cecilius Calvert, in June, 1632.

From first to last the Maryland colony was viewed by the Baltimores largely as an economic venture; they invested heavily in it and in time derived an enormous annual revenue from it. At the outset the second Lord Baltimore made provision for various types of immigrants qualified to develop his immense domain on a profitable basis. Heading his program was the allotment of one thousand acres to every gentleman who would transport five able men with supplies and an additional thousand acres for every additional group of five men brought overseas—each such estate to be erected into a manor "with all such royalties and privileges as are usually belonging to manors in England." In the second place, units of fifty and one hundred acres were offered to men and women who came at their own expense, with extra allowances for wives, children, and servants. All lands so granted were to pay a perpetual annual quitrent to the proprietary. With a view to bringing the soil quickly into cultivation, a special form of indenture was drafted for bond servants, and in a short time Negro slavery was introduced. Thus Maryland became a semi-feudal dominion, composed in part of manors owned by great landlords and tilled by white bond servants, tenants, and slaves, and in part of small freeholds cultivated by farmers of the middling order.

In planning his colony, Lord Baltimore adopted the broad principle of religious toleration. Holding a charter from a Protestant king, jealously watched by a nation in which the tide of Puritanism was rising high, he could not