was the passage of a law banishing the most active British partisans, and confiscating their property. The services of General Greene were rewarded by a grant of 10,000 guineas, to purchase him an estate. The Georgia Assembly passed a similar law of banishment and confiscation, and Greene received also from this province the present of a confiscated estate; while North Carolina acknowledged his services by a grant of wild lands.[58] The loyalists, finding that the mere recommendation of indemnity from Great Britain did not secure it to them from the State government, appointed a committee of their body to lay their grievances and their faithful services before the British parliament. A commission was accordingly appointed to inquire into and report upon their claims and losses; and in 1791, 4,123 claims were admitted, amounting to upwards of £8,000,000. All claims of £10,000 and under were paid in full, the remainder in a three-and-a-half per cent. stock. Claimants whose losses were the deprivation of lucrative offices received equivalent pensions. On the whole they were extremely well provided for and indemnified. The Penn and Calvert families received a considerable portion of this parliamentary allowance; besides which, we must not omit to mention that, in 1779, Pennsylvania, by act of assembly, granted to the heirs of William Penn, on the relinquishment of quit-rents and proprietary claims, the sum of £130,000, to be paid by instalments, commencing the first year after the peace. The State of Maryland was less liberal, as regarded her proprietary claims, on the plea of the illegitimacy of the infant representative of the Calverts. Whilst the great struggle for independence had been going on, and every state in turn, New Hampshire excepted, had been the scene of a desolating war, the heart of the nation had still been so vigorously alive that the organisation of the local governments and the arrangement of terms for confederation and union had never for one moment been lost sight of. Liberty and enlightenment gradually advanced, although the revolution made no violent change in the political institutions of America, beyond casting off the superintending power of the mother-country, and that power in a great degree was replaced by the authority of congress.