points of complaint, which I
enumerated. The proprietaries justify'd their conduct as well as they
could, and I the Assembly's. We now appeared very wide, and so far
from each other in our opinions as to discourage all hope of
agreement. However, it was concluded that I should give them the heads
of our complaints in writing, and they promis'd then to consider them.
I did so soon after, but they put the paper into the hands of their
solicitor, Ferdinand John Paris, who managed for them all their law
business in their great suit with the neighbouring proprietary of
Maryland, Lord Baltimore, which had subsisted 70 years, and wrote for
them all their papers and messages in their dispute with the Assembly.
He was a proud, angry man, and as I had occasionally in the answers of
the Assembly treated his papers with some severity, they being really
weak in point of argument and haughty in expression, he had conceived a
mortal enmity to me, which discovering itself whenever we met, I
declin'd the proprietary's proposal that he and I should discuss the
heads of complaint between our two selves, and refus'd treating with
anyone but them. They then by his advice put the paper into the hands
of the Attorney and Solicitor-General for their opinion and counsel
upon it, where it lay unanswered a year wanting eight days, during
which time I made frequent demands of an answer from the
proprietaries, but without obtaining any other than that they had not
yet received the opinion of the Attorney and Solicitor-General. What
it was when they did receive it I never learnt, for they did not
communicate it to me, but sent a long message to the Assembly drawn
and signed by Paris, reciting my paper, complaining of its want of
formality, as a rudeness on my part, and giving a flimsy justification
of their conduct, adding that they should be willing to accommodate
matters if the Assembly would send out _some person of candour_ to
treat with them for that purpose, intimating thereby that I was not
such.

[Illustration: "We now appeared very wide, and so far from each other
in our opinions as to discourage all hope of agreement"]

The want of formality or rudeness was, probably, my not having
address'd the paper to them with their assum'd titles of True and
Absolute Proprietaries of the Province of Pennsylvania, which I
omitted as not thinking it necessary in a paper, the intention of
which was only to reduce to a certainty by writing, what in
co