Our upper country, at last, has graduated from being classified as merely part of the backwoods of Lord Fairfax's Northern Neck and is now enrolled in the rapidly growing roster of colonial Virginia's counties. Unfortunately the conferring of that dignity did not alter the social problems of the frontier nor change, to any great degree, the turbulence and heterogeneous character of its population. The Irish element, particularly, appears to have been pugnacious and lawless, if one may judge from the frequency of proceedings before the Court for "battery" wherein defendants carry distinctly Hibernian names. There was no dearth of business, civil or criminal, awaiting the court's sessions. Those of the poorer class, however, were not alone in taking the law into their own hands. Cameron Parish, as heretofore appears, was set up in 1748. Whether its vestry was more arbitrary and tenacious of office or merely less diplomatic than was the rule elsewhere is not clear; but that there developed great dissatisfaction with its activities the records show. The Parish vestry, it will be remembered, exercised many powers of civil government. Originally the vestry of twelve gentlemen and their successors were chosen by vote of the parishioners; but gradually the practice developed in existing vestries, upon the death or resignation of a member, for the survivors themselves arbitrarily to appoint his successor. There never was unanimity of religious belief in Cameron the Parish nor in Loudoun the county. From the very beginning, as we have seen, the land was peopled by men and women of definitely divergent religious views--the Churchmen from Tidewater with some Baptists and Presbyterians, a large number of Quakers from Pennsylvania, Germans from overseas and no small number whose religious convictions, if existent, were of nebulous tenuity. Had the vestries stood annually for election the populace might have felt more closely represented; but with their membership exclusively taken from the landowning class which had migrated from the lower country, the Quakers, the Scotch-Irish, the Germans accepted a somewhat arbitrary rule less willingly than were they all churchmen and meeting together in common worship. The friction was not confined to Cameron. Similar troubles had developed elsewhere and petitions had been sent to Williamsburg for relief. In 1759 the Legislature decided to act. "Whereas" reads the preamble to Chapter XXI of the Laws of 1758-59