The beginning of the French war found Horatio Sharpe[600] fresh in office (1753) as the representative of the man to whom the people paid this money. There was need of resources to push the conflict, in which Maryland had common interests with Virginia and Pennsylvania. The delegates were willing to vote grants, provided the revenue of the Proprietary would share in the burden. This the governor refused to consider; but as the war went on, and the western settlements were abandoned before the Indian forays, Sharpe conceded the point, and £40,000 were raised, partly out of a double tax upon Catholics, who were in the main of the upper classes of the people. The question of supplying the army lasted longer than the £40,000, and each renewal of the controversy broadened the gulf between the governor and the lower house. It soon grew to be observed that the delegates planned their manœuvres with a view to overthrowing, under the stress of the times, the government of the Proprietary. Occasionally a fit of generosity would possess the delegates, as when they voted £50 a scalp to some Cherokee rangers, and £1,500 to the Maryland contingent in Forbes’s expedition against Du Quesne. It was never difficult, meantime, for them to lapse into their policy of obstruction. So Maryland did little to assist in the great conflict which drove the French from North America. When the war was practically closed, in 1760, the long dispute over the boundary with Pennsylvania was brought to an end, substantially, upon the agreement of 1732, by which the Proprietary of that day had been over-reached. This fixed the limits of the present State of Delaware, and marked the parallel which is now known as Mason and Dixon’s line. The most powerful colony south of that line was Virginia, with whom Maryland was also destined to have a protracted boundary dispute, that has extended to our own time, and has been in part relegated to the consideration of the new State, which the exigencies of the civil war caused to be detached from the Old Dominion. What was and is the most westerly of the head fountains of the Potomac (so the charter described the point from which the meridian of Maryland’s western line should run) depended on seeking that spot at the source of the northern or southern fork of the river. The decision gave or lost to Maryland thirty or forty square miles of rich territory. A temporary concession on Maryland’s part, which entailed such a loss, became a precedent which she has found it difficult to dislodge. Again, as the line followed down the Potomac, whether it gave the bed of that river to Virginia or to Maryland, has produced further dispute, complicated by diversities in the maps and by assumptions of rights, but in 1877 arbitration confirmed the bed to Maryland. Changing names and shifting and disappearing soil along the banks of the Chesapeake have also made an uncertainty of direction in the line, as it crosses the bay to the eastern shore.