The two hundred original settlers were increased as early as 1660 to twelve thousand, and in 1671 to nearly twenty thousand; their exact number at the protestant revolution is unknown. The settlements had extended from St. Mary's a considerable distance up the Potomac, and all along the Chesapeake Bay on both sides, and were seated chiefly on its shores, and around the estuaries of its rivers. Excepting St. Mary's, there appears to have been no place entitled to the appellation of a town, unless, says the author, we adopt the same number of houses to make a town, which it requires persons to constitute a riot. The _city_ of St. Mary's, which numbered fifty or sixty houses in two or three years from its planting, never much exceeded these humble limits. The colonists were almost universally planters of tobacco, and each plantation, according to an early writer, "was a little town of itself, every considerable planter's warehouse being a kind of shop," where inferior planters and others might obtain the necessary commodities. Tobacco supplied the purposes of gold and silver; but as this currency was in some respects inconvenient, the lords proprietaries struck coin, and imitated more powerful sovereigns by attempting,--and, as may be supposed, with the like success,--to circulate it at a rate beyond its intrinsic value. The act of 1686, making coins a legal tender at a certain advance beyond their real worth, deserves mention as establishing the provincial currency in lieu of sterling. There was also at this time a printing-press and a public printer; a circumstance peculiar to this colony at that early period. _Toleration was coeval with the province._ The oath of office prescribed by the proprietary to his governors, recognising the freedom of religious opinion in the amplest manner, "is in itself a text-book of official duty," and ought to be remembered to the honour of Cecilius Calvert, "when the lustre of a thousand diadems is pale." For the only two departures from this principle, the proprietary government is not responsible. An ordinance of Cromwell's Commissioners prohibited the profession of the Catholic religion; and the unscrupulous Fendall, at another time, banished the Quakers for refusing to subscribe an engagement of fidelity to the government. We are to seek, therefore, other causes than the intolerance of the proprietary for the Protestant revolution which we are now to notice.