with the Latin schoolmaster, provision for a schoolhouse, a "free school," a grammar school, and (in 1694) "for the accommodation of a good and sufficient school dame," and the like, are prominent matters of town record throughout the history.

These early records are not wanting in quaintness. When Captain Paul White was granted half an acre of land "provided he do build a dock and warehouse," the town "granteth no liberty of freehold or commonage upon it, and if he shall hereafter sell it, the town shall have the forsaking of it"; and the description of the half-acre was this: "At the end of Fish street joyneing to Merrimack river on the northwest, and from the river by the great rocks in a strait line to a stake by the way, and from that stake to another stake westerly by another great rock, and from a stake running over part of the rock upon a strait lyne westward to another stake by the rock."

Notwithstanding this precariousness of tenure and ambiguity of description, Captain White built the dock and got the land. And nigh two centuries before the coining or imagining of the phrase "woman's rights" a coroner's jury of twelve women held an inquest over Elizabeth Hunter, and they declared, "according to their best light and contiens, that the death of said Elizabeth was not by any wrong or violence done to her by any parson or thing, but by some sudden stopping of her breath."

Our fathers had their incidental peculiarities. But these have in later days been dragged out into enormous

and often exclusive prominence. Our ancestors were men and women like ourselves, but I think better and nobler, more just and conscientious, more earnest and true. They had as clear heads, live hearts, and tender sympathies as we. They had their virtues. and imperfections; but the virtues were substantial, the imperfections superficial.

Newbury was not an Arcadia. It had its troubles. There was in 1639 "much disturbance in the public meeting by reason of divers speaking at one and the same time." Offenders were not wanting. One man was fined for selling strong water without a license, another for suffering five Indians to be drunk at his house, a third for selling Indians liquor on the Lord's day. This man was put in the stocks for abusive carriage to his wife and child; that man was presented for reproachful speeches cast on the elders and others at a public church meeting, and one woman was presented for "using reproachful language unto Goody Silver,' "base lying divell, base lying tode." One of the chief proprietors was "bound over in sixty-six pounds, thirteen shillings and sixpence for contemptuous speech and carriage to Mr. Saltonstall." Nay, the wife of Joseph Swett was presented and fined for wearing a silk hood and scarf when her husband was worth less than two hundred pounds, though it is grievous to relate that four other wives, whose husbands were worth more than two hundred pounds, were by law permitted to flaunt in all the silken gorgeousness of hood and scarf. Such sumptuary laws as this,

however, came down from England under Elizabeth, and all the influence of the magistrate could not keep them alive.

Their peculiarities were often not peculiar. Some of them were but the universal stain of the age, not all washed out in the ocean voyage, but soon to fade away. Our fathers had cleared themselves at a bound from such a mass of the exuviæ of the mother country that the few remaining spots have attracted the world's attention by the very contrast. Some of the peculiarities were but an intense recoil from the mummeries of an effete religion and from all its outward badges. The cross on the king's colors was to them the "relique of anti-Christian superstition." The organ long seemed to them, as they had seen it used, a papistical device. They were slow to admit what they called dumb reading of the Scriptures, that is, reading without comment, because associated in their minds with the unintelligent readings and recitings of Romanism. They had come out of the thick of the battle, and these things seemed to them as the stars and bars seemed to a Union soldier after years of hard and bloody warfare. These things had become to them the very badge and banner of a ruinous superstition, and they recoiled from them with an intensity almost like that with which their posterity recoiled from using or permitting to use the petty stamps which marked their subjection to a despotic power beyond the ocean.

But there are two famous topics connected with the region on which I wish to say that vastly too much

has been said already; and that much of the censure has been as one-eyed and heedless as much of the concession and defense has been mistaken and needless. I refer to the matter of Quakers and witches. Here the blame for the boundless sins of the ages and nations has been brought and laid at the door, so to speak, of infinitesimal and transient sinners, repentant too; and so the accumulated vials of wrath have. been poured out on the least of all the offenders. There was grave wrongdoing, but it is time that the blows dealt were proportioned to the offense and the offenders.

Old Newbury, indeed, never had witch or Quaker hanged. But it is true that seventeen witnesses bore testimony against Elizabeth Morse as a witch, and that she was condemned, reprieved, and barely saved. It is also true that Newbury men were fined for entertaining Quakers. But it is fair to remember that in the same year in which John Emery was fined four pounds for this last offense and Lydia Wardwell the Quakeress was severely whipped, the same Lydia Wardwell had already presented herself naked in the meetinghouse at Newbury. And if the young colony in its weakness. by law excluded a conflicting and at that time disorderly element from its narrow precincts, wherein was the government more blameworthy than the Congress of these United States, which in its hour of greatness and strength and with two hundred years of additional light, to-day prohibits Chinese laborers from entering this broad land? And when on the fourth of March,

in the year of our Lord 1885, the President of the United States declares to the nation that "these prohibitory laws must be rigidly enforced," and the listening multitude applaud with cheer upon cheer, what has the nineteenth century to say to the seventeenth? When, therefore, an English historian of our time goes out of his way to remark that "the Puritans, fleeing from persecution to New England, put people to death for no other crime than that they preached doctrines differing from their own," we will not raise the question whether it was solely for opinion's sake, nor will we dilate on the persistent eagerness that rushed upon martyrdom, nor will we frame an apology. Yet we will turn and ask him if he knows how extensive was the martyrdom and how it compares with similar scenes in modern history. For the imagination reverts at once to the hundred thousand victims burned, strangled, beheaded, and buried alive in the Netherlands by order of the illustrious Charles Fifth; to the thirty thousand lives destroyed and the two hundred and ninety thousand savage punishments inflicted in Spain by the Inquisition before the end of that century; to the auto-da-fé at Lisbon, a century after the Quaker delusion, where fifty heretics were put to death at one festivity; or perhaps to "Merrie England" with its tortures and fires and its hundreds of victims dragged to death solely for opinion's sake; and we ask again, how many were the Quaker martyrs in the whole history of Massachusetts? They were just four all told! And these were just four too many.