There are among the archives of Maryland preserved at Annapolis (the colonial records are perhaps the best in the country) some curious documentary proofs of the existence of a large number of Puritans in the colony. Indeed, these State papers contain almost all the account that we have of their presence there at an early date, as all their purely ecclesiastical documents have perished. They were there, however, from a very early period, and in such large numbers, that Maryland cannot be called a Roman Catholic colony in the sense that Massachusetts can be called a Puritan colony, or Virginia a colony of the Cavaliers. The Protestants were in the majority from the very beginning, as the reports of the Jesuit fathers clearly show. The celebrated Act of Toleration was evidently a compromise between the Lord Proprietor and his Protestant subjects, a piece of legislation which reflects great credit upon the common-sense of Lord Baltimore, even if we may suspect that on this occasion he made a virtue of necessity. Of these Protestants so large a number were Puritans in their sympathies, that they ruled the colony during the Commonwealth, passing a law, which is little to their credit, which deprived both Papists and prelatists of any part in the government. For a long time the colony continued Puritan in its tone. So late as 1676 Lord Baltimore objected to the proposed action of the Privy Council of England looking toward the establishment of the Church of the mother country as the established church of Maryland, on the ground that the large majority of the inhabitants of the province were either Presbyterians, Independents, or Quakers. He represents those of his own faith as being but a small minority. The Episcopalians, also, did not form a majority until some time after the establishment of the Church of England, at the beginning of the next century.