A Century of Science and Other EssaysEdward Augustus Freeman, son of John Freeman of Redmore Hall, in Worcestershire, was born at Harborne, Staffordshire, August 2, 1823. His life was always purely that of a scholar and teacher, and a chronicle of its events would consist chiefly of the record of books published and offices held at the University of Oxford. He was graduated at Trinity College in 1845, and remained there as a Fellow until 1847. In 1857, 1863, and 1873 he served as Examiner in Modern History. In 1880 he was chosen honorary Fellow of Trinity, and in 1884 Fellow of Oriel. In the latter year he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History, succeeding Bishop Stubbs in that position. It is not necessary to enumerate the honorary degrees which he received from Oxford and Cambridge, and from universities in various European countries. At the time of his death he was a member of learned societies in nearly all parts of the world. For many years he had been a Knight Commander of the Greek Order of the Saviour. He had also received honours of knighthood from Servia and Montenegro. In 1868 he was a candidate for Parliament, but failed of election; and that seems to have been his sole venture in the world of politics. His travels upon the continent of Europe were many and extensive. When at home he lived in rural seclusion,--"far from the madding crowd,"--upon his estate at Somerleaze, near Wells and its n.o.ble cathedral; only in these latter years he made a home for himself, during the Oxford terms, at St. Giles in that city.
From the very beginning Freeman's historical studies were characterized on the one hand by philosophical breadth of view, and on the other hand by extreme accuracy of statement, and such loving minuteness of detail as is apt to mark the local antiquary whose life has been spent in studying only one thing. It was to the combination of these two characteristics that the preeminent greatness of his historical work was due. We see the combination already prefigured, and to some extent realized, in his first book, "A History of Architecture," published in 1849, although this can hardly be called such a work of original research as the books of his maturer years. Two years afterward appeared the learned "Essay on the Origin and Development of Window Tracery in England," a work which I do not feel able to criticise, but which I am sure is very charming to read. I believe that this book was followed by at least three others in the same department, "Architectural Antiquities of Gower," "The Antiquities of St. David's," and "The Architecture of Llandaff Cathedral," but I have never seen them. In the preface to the essay on window tracery Mr. Freeman alludes to Rev. G. W. c.o.x as his "friend and coadjutor in many undertakings," and I have heard of a volume of poems "by G. W. C. and E. A. F." published in those days, but I know no more about it. It is to be hoped that these early works, which have become very scarce, will before long be collected and reprinted.
When, after these publications on architecture, Freeman began publishing books and articles on ancient Greece and on the Saracens, I presume there were many of his readers who thoughtlessly a.s.sumed that he had changed his vocation; he must more than once have had to answer the stupid question why he had gone over from architecture to history. But in his mind the evolution of architecture was never separated from the course of political history; and the effect of these early studies in architecture, which were indeed never abandoned, but kept up with enthusiasm in later years, was to give increased definiteness and concreteness to his presentation of historical events. When I use such a word as "evolution" in this connection, I do not mean that Mr. Freeman was in any sense a "disciple" of the modern evolution philosophy. There is nothing to show that he ever gave any time or attention to the study of that subject, or that he had any technical knowledge even of its terminology. Whether consciously or unconsciously, however, he was an evolutionist in spirit. From the outset he was deeply impressed with the solidarity of human history, and no student of political development in our time has made more effective use of the comparative method.
From 1850 to 1863 Freeman's published writings were chiefly concerned with Mediterranean history viewed on the broadest scale in relation to all those movements of progressive humanity which have had that great inland sea for a common centre. Here came those brilliant essays on "Ancient Greece and Mediaeval Italy," "Homer and the Homeric Age," "The Athenian Democracy," "Alexander the Great," "Greece during the Macedonian Period," "Mommsen's History of Rome," "The Flavian Caesars,"
and others since collected in the second series of his "Historical Essays." To this period also belongs the little book on the "History of the Saracens," based upon lectures given at the Philosophical Inst.i.tution in Edinburgh.
From these Mediterranean studies may be said to have grown two of Freeman's three great works,--both of them, unfortunately, left incomplete at his death,--the "History of Federal Government" and the "History of Sicily." Freeman was remarkably free from the common habit--common even among eminent historians--of concentrating his attention upon some exceptionally brilliant period or so-called "cla.s.sical age," to the exclusion of other ages that went before and came after. Such a habit is fatal to all correct understanding of history, even that of the ages upon which attention is thus unwisely concentrated. Freeman understood that in some respects, if not in others, the history of Greece is just as important after the battle of Chaeronea as before; and he became especially interested in the history of the Achaian League and other Greek attempts at federation. Thence grew the idea of studying the development of federal union as the highest form of nation-building, beginning with its germs in the leagues among Greek autonomous cities. The enterprise was arduous, involving as it did the determination of obscure points in the history of many ages and countries, more particularly Greece, Switzerland, and America. The first volume, containing the general introduction and the history of the Greek federations, was published in 1863, a stalwart octavo of 721 pages. It bore upon the t.i.tle-page a motto from "The Federalist," No.
XVIII.,--"Could the interior structure and regular operation of the Achaian League be ascertained, it is probable that more light might be thrown by it on the science of federal government than by any of the like experiments with which we are acquainted." This book is of priceless value, and if Freeman had never published anything more, it would have ent.i.tled him to a place in the foremost rank of historians.
It deals thoroughly with a very important portion of the world's history to which no one before had even begun to do justice. Its admirable philosophical spirit is matched by its keen critical insight and its minute and exhaustive control of all sources of information. Its narrative, moreover, is full of human interest. Yet it never became a popular book. It was hard to make people believe that the Achaian League could be interesting, and in order to realize the philosophical value of the whole story most readers would need to have the later portions of it set before their eyes.
But this n.o.ble work, in some respects the grandest of the author's conceptions, was never completed. The first volume was all that ever was published. For this fact I have sometimes heard Americans offer a grotesque explanation. The volume published in 1863, in the middle of our Civil War, bore the t.i.tle "History of Federal Government, from the Foundation of the Achaian League to the Disruption of the United States." This t.i.tle gave offence in America. It was too hastily taken to indicate that the author wished well to the Southern Confederacy, and regarded its independence as an accomplished fact. There can be no doubt that the t.i.tle was ill chosen; but to suppose, as some people did, that chagrin at the success of the Union arms prevented Freeman from going on with his book was simply ridiculous. It was not anything that happened in America, but something that happened in Europe, which caused him to defer the completion of his second volume. That volume was to deal with federal government as exemplified in Switzerland and otherwise in Germany; and the war of 1866 between Prussia and Austria marked the beginning of organic changes in Germany which Freeman was anxious to watch for a while before finishing his book.
He therefore turned aside and took up the third of his three great works,--the only one that he lived to complete,--the "History of the Norman Conquest of England, its Causes and its Results." Upon this subject he had thought and studied for nearly twenty years, or ever since the time when he was publishing works on architecture. As one turns the leaves of these stout volumes, each of seven or eight hundred pages, crowded with minute and accurate erudition, one marvels that the author could carry along so many researches and of such exhaustive character at the same time. Alike in Greek, in German, and in English history, along with abundant generalizations, often highly original and suggestive, we find investigations of obscure points in which every item of evidence is weighed as in an apothecary's scale, and in all these directions Freeman was working at once. When it came to publishing, volume followed volume with surprising quickness. Turning aside in 1866 from the second volume of the "Federal Government" when a large part of it was already written, Freeman brought out the first volume of the "Norman Conquest" in 1867, the second in 1868, the third in 1869, the fourth in 1871, the fifth more leisurely in 1876. The proportions of this work are eminently characteristic of the author's historical perspective. In order to understand the Norman Conquest, a survey of all previous English history, and especially of the struggle between Englishmen and Danes, is essential; and the first volume carries us in one great sweep from the landing of Hengist to the accession of Edward the Confessor, while the early history of Normandy also receives due attention. We now enter the region of proximate causes, which require more detailed specification, and the second volume takes us through the four-and-twenty years of Edward's reign. His death hurries the situation to its dramatic climax, and the whole of the third volume is devoted to the events of the single year 1066. The completion of the Conquest down to the death of the Conqueror is treated with less detail, and the twenty-one years are comprised within a volume. Finally, in summing up the results of the great event, the last volume covers two centuries, and leaves us in the reign of Edward I., the king who did so much to make modern English history the glorious tale that it has been. In finishing his work upon these proportions, Freeman encountered many points in the reign of William Rufus that needed fuller treatment, and so in 1882 he published in two volumes the history of that reign as a sequel to the "Norman Conquest." Taken as a whole, the seven volumes give us such a masterly philosophic a.n.a.lysis and such a picturesque and vivid narrative of the history of England in the eleventh century that it must be p.r.o.nounced the monumental work upon which Freeman's reputation will chiefly rest.
While these volumes were in course of publication, there was scarcely a year when its busy author, from his wealth of knowledge, did not bring out some other book. Sometimes it was what men count a slight affair, such as a textbook,--albeit the textbook is perhaps the hardest kind of book to write well; sometimes it was a brief monograph or course of lectures; sometimes a collection of earlier writings. There was an "Old English History for Children" (1869), a "Short History of the Norman Conquest" (1880), and a "General Sketch of European History" (1873). The "Growth of the English Const.i.tution" was suggestively treated in a small volume (1872). There was a "History of the Cathedral Church at Wells"
(1870), and there was a collection of "Historical and Architectural Sketches," chiefly from Italy (1876), followed by "Sketches from the Subject and Neighbour Lands of Venice" (1881). In these two last-named volumes, ill.u.s.trated chiefly from the author's own drawings, one sees that his interest in Diocletian and Theodoric was scarcely less keen than in Alfred of Wess.e.x or William the Norman. No other modern traveller has done such justice to Istria and Dalmatia. "I am not joking," he writes, "when I say that the best guide to those parts is still the account written by the Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus more than nine hundred years back. But it is surely high time that there should be another." Freeman's accurate knowledge of southeastern Europe and its peoples, coupled with his wide and comprehensive study of the contact between Christians and Mussulmans in all ages, led him to take very sound and wholesome views of the unspeakable Turk and the everlasting Eastern Question; and in 1877, when public attention was so strongly directed toward the Balkans, he published a lucid and graphic little volume on "The Ottoman Power in Europe." This book was a companion to the "History of the Saracens," above mentioned, and the two together make as good an introduction to Mussulman history in its relations to Europe as the general reader is likely to find.
Among the host of side works which were issued during these years, two call for especial mention. In the lectures on "Comparative Politics,"
given at the Royal Inst.i.tution in 1873, Freeman a.n.a.lyzed and described the different forms a.s.sumed by Aryan inst.i.tutions among Greeks, Romans, and Teutons. This book is his most distinct attempt to make his central theme the career of an inst.i.tution, such as kingship or representative a.s.semblies, rather than the career of a state or a people. In the "History of Federal Government," the two kinds of treatment, a.n.a.lytical and synthetical, were combined in a way that would, I think, have made that his grandest work, had it been completed. In the lectures we get an able a.n.a.lysis and comparison, full of fruitful suggestions, and in our author's happiest style. There is not the originality of scholarship here that we find in Sir Henry Maine, nor do we find the breadth of view that can be gained only when the barbaric non-Aryan world is taken into account. Such breadth was not to be expected twenty years ago, and before the path-breaking work of the American scholar Lewis Morgan.
Freeman's outlook was confined to the Aryan domain; but he did not attempt more than he knew. His task was conceived with so clear a consciousness of his limitations, and every point was so richly ill.u.s.trated, that the "Comparative Politics" remains one of his most useful and charming books.
The other work calling for especial mention is "The Historical Geography of Europe," published in 1880. Its object was "to trace out the extent of territory which the different states and nations of Europe have held at different times in the world's history; to mark the different boundaries which the same country has had, and the different meanings in which the same name has been used." Such work is of great and fundamental importance, because men are perpetually making grotesque mistakes through ignorance or forgetfulness of the changes which have occurred on the map; as, for example, when somebody speaks of Lyons in the twelfth century as a French city, or supposes that Charles the Bold invaded Swiss territory. Historical writings fairly swarm with blunders based upon unconscious errors of this sort, and nowhere did Freeman do better service than in pointing them out on every possible occasion. No writer has so effectively warned the historical student against that besetting sin of "bondage to the modern map." His exposition of historical geography is a book of purest gold, and no serious student of history can safely neglect it.
In 1881 Mr. Freeman visited the United States, and gave lectures on "The English People in its Three Homes" and "The Practical Bearings of European History," which were afterward published in a volume. After returning home he published "Some Impressions of the United States"
(1883), a very entertaining book because of the author's ingrained habit of comparing and discriminating social phenomena upon so wide a scale.
Gauls and Illyrians, Wess.e.x and Achaia, come in to point each a moral, and show how to this great historian the whole European past was almost as much a present and living reality as the incidents occurring before his eyes.
In the same year, 1883, Freeman published his "English Towns and Districts," a series of addresses and sketches in which he had from time to time embodied the results of his antiquarian and architectural studies in many parts of England and Wales. It is a book of rare fascination as ill.u.s.trating how largely national history is made up of local history, and how it is impossible to understand the former correctly without paying much attention to the latter. In further ill.u.s.tration of the same point, Freeman projected the well-known series of monographs on "Historic Towns," to which he himself contributed the opening volume, on "Exeter" (1886).
Having been called to the Regius Professorship at Oxford in 1884, Freeman's next publications were university lectures on "Methods of Historical Study," "The Chief Periods of European History," "Fifty Years of European History," "Teutonic Conquest in Gaul and Britain," "Greater Greece and Greater Britain," and "George Washington the Expander of England" (1886-88). Meanwhile, the colossal work on "Sicily" was rapidly a.s.suming its final shape. This topic obviously touched upon Freeman's other two chief topics at two points. Ancient Sicily was part of that Greek world which he had so thoroughly studied in connection with the beginnings of federal government. Mediaeval Sicily was one of the most important of the Norman's fields of activity. But the thought of writing the history of that fateful island did not come to Freeman as an afterthought suggested by his other two great works. On the contrary, the conception of the historic position of Sicily was among the first that stimulated his philosophic mind to undertake comprehensive studies.
The contact between the Aryan and Semitic civilizations along the coasts of the Mediterranean is surely the most interesting topic in the history of mankind, as the reader will at once admit when he reflects that it involves the origin and rise of Christianity. But, restricting ourselves to the political aspects of the subject, how full of dramatic grandeur it is! How stirring were the scenes of which Sicily has been the theatre! There struggled Carthage, first against Greek, and then against Roman; and in later times the conflict was renewed between Arabic-speaking Mussulmans and Greek-speaking Christians, until the Norman came to a.s.sert his sway over both, and to loosen the clutch of the Saracen upon the centre of the Mediterranean world. The theme, in its manifold bearings, was worthy of Freeman, and he was worthy of it.
His design was to start with the earliest times in which Sicily is known to history, and to carry on the narrative as far as the death of the Emperor Frederick II. and the final overthrow of the Hohenstaufen dynasty. The scheme lay ripening in his mind for nearly half a century, and its consummation was begun with characteristic swiftness and vigour.
Two n.o.ble volumes were published in 1891, and the third was out of the author's hands by the end of last January. But for a death most lamentably sudden and premature there was no reason why the whole task should not have been soon accomplished. The author seems to have fallen a victim to his superabundant zeal and energy. He had always been a traveller, visiting in person the scenes of his narratives, narrowly scrutinizing each locality with the eye of an antiquarian, exploring battlefields and making drawings of churches and castles, running from one end of Europe to the other to verify some mooted point. It was, I believe, on some such expedition as this that he found himself, last March, at Alicante, where an attack of smallpox suddenly ended his life.
To the faithful students of his works the tidings of Freeman's death must have come like the news of the loss of a personal friend. To those who enjoyed his friendship even in a slight way the sense of loss was keen, for he was a very lovable man. Some people, indeed, seem to think of him as a gruff and growling pedant, ever on the lookout for some culprit to chastise; but, while not without some basis, this notion is far from the truth. Freeman's conception of the duty of a historian was a high one, and he lived up to it. He had a holy horror of slovenly and inaccurate work; pretentious sciolism was something that he could not endure, and he knew how easy it is to press garbled or misunderstood history into the service of corrupt politics. He found the minds of English-speaking contemporaries full of queer notions of European history, especially as to the Middle Ages,--notions usually misty and often grotesquely wrong; and he did more than any other Englishman of our time to correct such errors and clear up men's minds. Such work could not be done without attacking blunders and the propagators of blunders. Freeman's a.s.saults were not infrequent, and they were apt to be crushing; but they were made in the interests of historic truth, and there were none too many of them. Like "Mr. F.'s Aunt," the great historian did "hate a fool;" and it is clearly right that fools should be silenced and made to know their place.
Not only foolishness and inaccuracy did Freeman hate, but also tyranny, fraud, and social injustice, under whatever specious disguises they might be veiled. In matters of right and wrong his perceptions were rather clouded. He never could be duped into admiring a charlatan like the late Emperor of the French. Upon the Eastern Question he wielded a Varangian axe, and had his advice been heeded, the Commander of the Faithful would ere now have been sent back to Brusa, or beyond. But while in politics and in criticism he could hit hard, his disposition was as tender and humane as Uncle Toby's. Eminently characteristic is the discussion on fox-hunting which he carried on with Anthony Trollope some years ago in the "Fortnightly Review," in which he condemned that time-honoured sport as intolerably cruel.
Mr. Freeman was very domestic in his habits. When not travelling, he was to be found in his country home, writing in his own library. When he was in the United States, it amused him to see people's surprise when told that he did not live in a city, and did not spend his time deciphering musty ma.n.u.scripts in public libraries or archives. He used to say that, even in point of economy, he thought it better to dwell among pleasant green fields and to consult one's own books than to take long journeys or be stifled in dirty cities in order to consult other people's book.
His chief subjects of study favoured such a policy, for most of the sources of information on the eleventh century, as well as upon ancient Greece, are contained in printed volumes. Now and then he missed some little point upon which a ma.n.u.script might have helped him. But one cannot help wishing he might have stayed among the quiet fields of Somerset instead of taking that last fatal journey to Alicante.
It was chiefly with the political aspects of history that Freeman concerned himself; not in the old-fashioned way, as a mere narrative of the deeds of kings and cabinets, but in scientific fashion, as an application of the comparative method to the various processes of nation-building. I do not mean that his narrative was subordinated to scientific exposition, but that it was informed and vitalized by the spirit and methods of science. In pure description Freeman was often excellent; his account of the death of William Rufus, for example, is a masterpiece of impressive narrative. In description and in argument alike Freeman usually confined his attention to political history, except when he dealt in his suggestive way with architecture and archaeology. To art in general, to the history of philosophy and of scientific ideas, to the development of literary expression, of manners and customs, of trade and the industrial arts, he devoted much less thought. I believe he did not fully approve of his friend Green's method of carrying along political, social, and literary topics abreast in his "History of the English People." Few will doubt, however, that in this respect Green's artistic grasp upon his subject was stronger than Freeman's.
It is some slight consolation for our bitter loss to know that many of the great historian's books were in large part written long before he felt the time to be ripe for completing and publishing them. Some of the unfinished portions may be brought toward completeness and edited by other hands. In this way I hope we may look for one or two more volumes of the "Sicily," and perhaps for the second volume of the "Federal Government," dealing with the Swiss and other German federations.
Probably no other Englishman, and few other men anywhere in our time, knew anything like so much as Freeman about the history of Switzerland.
I once or twice begged him to make haste and finish that volume, but desisted; for it was evident that "Sicily" was absorbing him, and an author does not like to be pestered with advice to turn aside from the work that is uppermost in his mind.
_November, 1892._
X
CAMBRIDGE AS VILLAGE AND CITY[27]
We have met together this evening on one of those occasions, which keep recurring, for communities as well as for individuals, when it is desirable to take a retrospect of the past, to call attention to some of the characteristic incidents in our history, to sum up the work we have done and estimate the position we occupy in the world. As long as we retain the decimal numeration that is natural to ten-fingered creatures, we shall encounter such moments at intervals of half centuries and centuries, and happy are the communities that can meet them without shameful memories that shun the light of history; happy are the people that can look back upon the work of their fathers and in their heart of hearts p.r.o.nounce it good! What a blot it was upon the civic fame of every Greek community that took part in putting out the brightest light of h.e.l.las in the wicked Peloponnesian War! Can any right-minded Venetian look without blushing at the bronze horses that surmount the stately portal of St. Mark's?--a perpetual memento of that black day when ravening commercial jealousy decoyed an army of Crusaders to the despoiling of the chief city of Christendom, and thus broke away the strongest barrier in the path of the advancing Turk! What must the citizen of Paris think to-day of cowardly ma.s.sacres of unresisting prisoners, such as happened in 1418 and in 1792? Is there any dweller in Birmingham who would not gladly expunge from the past that summer evening which witnessed the burning of the house and library of Dr.
Priestley? From such melancholy scenes, and from complicity in political crime, our community, our neighbourhood, has been notably free. The annals of Ma.s.sachusetts, during its existence of nearly three centuries, are written in a light that is sometimes dull or sombre, but very seldom lurid. In particular the career of Cambridge has been a placid one. We do not find in it many things to startle us; but there is much that we can approve, much upon which, without falling into the self-satisfied mood that is the surest index of narrowness and provincialism, we may legitimately pride ourselves. In commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the incorporation of Cambridge as a city, a retrospect of the half century is needful; but we shall find it pleasant to go farther back, and start with a glimpse of the beginnings of our town.
I came near saying "humble beginnings;" it is a stock phrase, and perhaps savours of tautology, since beginnings are apt to be humble as compared with long-matured results. But an adjective which better suits the beginnings of our Cambridge is "dignified." Circ.u.mstances of dignity attended the selection of this spot upon the bank of Charles River as the site of a town, and there was something peculiarly dignified in the circ.u.mstances of the change of vocation which determined the change in its name. The story is a very different one from that of the founding of towns in the Old World, in the semi-barbarous times when the art of nation-making was in its infancy. In those earlier ages, it was only through prolonged warfare against enemies nearly equal in prowess and resources that a free political life could be maintained; and it was only after numberless crude experiments that nations could be formed in which political rights could be efficiently preserved for the people.
All the training that such long ages of turbulence could impart had been gained by our forefathers in the Old World. To the founders of our Cambridge it had come as a rich inheritance. They were not as the rough followers of Alaric or Hengist. They had profited by the work of Roman civilization, with its vast and subtle nexus of legal and political ideas. In the hands of their fathers had been woven the wonderful fabric of English law; they were familiar with parliamentary inst.i.tutions; they had been brought up in a country where the king's peace was better preserved than anywhere else in Europe, and where at the same time self-government was maintained in full vigour. They had profited, moreover, by the scholastic learning of the Middle Ages and the Greek scholarship of the Renaissance; nor was the newly awakening spirit of scientific inquiry, visible in Galileo and Gilbert, lost upon their keen and inquisitive minds. These Puritans, heirs to what was strongest and best in the world's culture, came to Ma.s.sachusetts Bay in order to put into practice a theory of civil government in which the interests both of liberty and of G.o.dliness seemed to them likely to be best subserved.
They came to plant the most advance civilization in the midst of a heathen wilderness, and thus the selection of a seat of government for the new commonwealth was an affair of dignity and importance.
Half a dozen towns, including Boston, had already been begun, when it was decided that a site upon the bank of Charles River, three or four miles inland, would be most favourable for the capital of the Puritan colony. It would be somewhat more defensible against a fleet than the peninsulas of Boston and Charlestown. The warships to be dreaded at that moment were not so much those of any foreign power as those of King Charles himself; for none could tell that the grim clouds of civil war then lowering upon the horizon of England and Scotland might not also darken the coast of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay. When the site was selected, on the 28th of December, 1630, it was agreed that the governor, deputy governor, and all the Court of a.s.sistants (except Endicott, already settled at Salem) should build their houses here. Fortunately no name was bestowed upon the new town. It was known simply as the New Town, and here in the years before 1638 the General Court was several times a.s.sembled. During those seven years the number of Puritans in New England increased from about 1500 to nearly 20,000. It was also clear that the King's troubles at home were likely to keep him from molesting Ma.s.sachusetts. With the increased feeling of security, Boston came to be preferred as the seat of government, and only two of its members ever fulfilled the agreement to build their houses in the New Town.
The building of the New Town, however, furnished the occasion for determining at the outset what kind of government the Puritan commonwealth should have. It was to be a walled town, for defence against frontier barbarism of the New World type; not the formidable destructive power of an Attila or a Bayazet, but the feeble barbarism of the red men and the Stone Age, so that a wall of masonry was not required, but a wooden palisade would do. In 1632 the Court of a.s.sistants imposed a tax of 60 for the purpose of building this palisade; but the men of Watertown refused to pay their share, on the ground that they were not represented in the taxing body. The ensuing discussion resulted in the establishment of a House of Deputies, in which every town was represented. Henceforth the Court of a.s.sistants together with the House of Deputies formed the General Court. There was no authority for such a representative body in the charter, which vested the government in the Court of a.s.sistants; but, as Hutchinson tells us, the people a.s.sumed that the right to such representation was implied in that clause of the charter which reserved to them the natural rights of Englishmen. Thus the building of a wooden palisade from Ash Street to Jarvis Field furnished the occasion for the first distinct a.s.sertion in the New World of the principles that were to bear fruit in the independence of the United States.
But the most interesting event in the history of the New Town before it became Cambridge was the brief sojourn of the Rev. Thomas Hooker and his company, from Braintree in England. In popular generalizations it is customary to allude to our Puritan forefathers as if they were all alike in their ways of thinking, whereas in reality it would be difficult to point out any group of men and women among whom individualism has more strongly flourished. Among the numberless differences of opinion and policy, it was only a few--and mostly such as were related to vital political questions--that blazed up in acts of persecution. For the disorganization wrought by Mrs. Hutchinson swift banishment seemed the only available remedy; but slighter differences could be healed by a peaceful secession, which some people deprecated as the "removal of a candlestick." Such a secession was that of Hooker and his friends. The difference between Hooker's ideal of government and Winthrop's has come to be recognized as in some measure foreshadowing the different conceptions of Jefferson and Hamilton in later days. But of controversy between the two eminent Puritans only slight traces are left. One act of omission on the part of the friendly seceders is more forcible than reams of argument: the founders of Connecticut did not see fit to limit the suffrage by the qualification of church membership.
The removal of so many people to the banks of the Connecticut left in the New Town only eleven families of those who had settled here before 1635. But depopulation was prevented by the arrival of a new congregation from England. There stands on our common a monument in commemoration of John Bridge, who was for many years a selectman of Cambridge, and dwelt beyond the western limits of the town, on or near the site since famous as the headquarters of Washington and the home of Longfellow. This John Bridge, deacon of the First Church, was one of the earliest settlers of the New Town, and one of the eleven householders that stayed behind, a connecting link between the old congregation of Thomas Hooker and the new congregation of Thomas Shepard. The coming of this eminent divine was undoubtedly an event of cardinal importance in the history of our community, for in the Hutchinson controversy, which shook the little colony to its foundations, his zeal and vigilance in exposing heresy were conspicuously shown; and, if we may believe Cotton Mather, it was this circ.u.mstance that led to the selection of the New Town as the site for the projected college. It was well for students of divinity to sit under the preaching of such a man, and of such as he might train up to succeed him. How vain were all such hopes of keeping this New English Canaan free from heresy was shown when Henry Dunster, first president of the college, was censured by the magistrates and dismissed from office for disapproving of infant baptism!
In the great English universities at that time Royalism and Episcopacy prevailed at Oxford, while Puritanism more or less allied with Republicanism was rife at Cambridge. Ever since the fourteenth century a superior flexibility in opinion had been observable in the eastern counties, whence came so many of the people that founded New England.
Not only Hooker and Shepard, but most of our clergy, among whom individualism was so rife, were graduates of Cambridge. When it was decided that the New Town was to be the home of our college, it was natural for people to fall into the habit of calling it Cambridge; and this name, so long enshrined already in their affections, already made ill.u.s.trious by Erasmus and Fisher, by Latimer and Cranmer, by Burghley and Walsingham and the two Bacons, by Edmund Spenser and Ben Jonson,--this name of such fame and dignity was adopted in 1638 by an order of the General Court. The map of the United States abounds in town names taken at random from the Old World, often inappropriate and sometimes ludicrous from the incongruity of a.s.sociations. The name of our city is connected by a legitimate bond of inheritance with that of the beautiful city on the Cam. It was given in the thought that the work for scholarship, for G.o.dliness, and for freedom, which had so long been carried on in the older city, was to be continued in the younger. The name thus given was a pledge to posterity, and it has been worthily fulfilled.
Into the history of the town of Cambridge during the two centuries after it received its name I do not propose to enter. But a glimpse of its general appearance during the greater part of that period is needful, in order to give precision and the right sort of emphasis to the contrast which we see before us to-day. The Cambridge of those days was simply the seat of the college, not yet developed into a university. Within the memory of persons now living, Old Cambridge was commonly alluded to as "the village." In the original laying out of the township we seem to see a reminiscence of the ancient threefold part.i.tion into town mark, arable mark, and common. The "east gate," near the corner of Harvard and Linden streets, and the "west gate," at the corner of Ash and Brattle, marked the limits of the town in those directions. The town was at first comprised between Harvard Street and the marshes which cut off approach to the river bank. Afterward, the "West End," from Harvard Square to Sparks Street, was gradually covered with homesteads. The common began, as now, hard by G.o.d's Acre, the venerable burying ground, and afforded pasturage for the village cattle as far as Linnaean Street. The regions now occupied by Cambridgeport and East Cambridge contained the arable district with many farms, small and large, but everywhere salt marshes bordered the river, and much of the country was a wild woodland. The tale of wolves killed in Cambridge for the year 1696 was seventy-six, and a bear was seen roaming as late as 1754. It was a rough country which the British first encountered when they landed at Lechmere Point in 1775, on their night march to Lexington. Cambridge then turned its back toward Boston, to which the only approach was by a causeway and bridge at what we now call Boylston Street, and by this route the distance was eight miles, as we still read upon the ancient milestone in G.o.d's Acre. To complete our outline of the village, we must recall the princ.i.p.al public buildings. The meetinghouse, a little south of the site of Dane Hall, was used both as church and as townhouse until 1708, when a building was erected in the middle of Harvard Square to serve for town meetings and courts. A little eastward, near the "east gate," stood the parsonage. The schoolhouse was behind the site of Holyoke House. The jail stood on then west side of Winthrop Square, which was then an open market. Between this market and Harvard Square, in the sanded parlour of the Blue Anchor Tavern, then selectmen held their meetings; and on the corner of the street which still bears the name of Harvard's first president was something rarely to be seen in so small a village, the printing press now known as the University Press, established in 1639,--the only one in English America until Boston followed the example in 1676.
Until the beginning of the present century these outlines of Cambridge remained with but little change, save for the building of n.o.ble houses on s.p.a.cious estates toward Mount Auburn in one direction, and upon Dana Hill in the other. The occupants of many of these estates were members of the Church of England, and the building of Christ Church in 1759 was one marked symptom of the change that was creeping over the little Puritan community. It was a change toward somewhat wider views of life, and toward the softening of old animosities. In contrast with the age in which we live the whole eighteenth century in New England seems a slow and quiet time, when the public pulse beat more languidly, or at any rate less feverishly, than now. The people of New England led a comparatively isolated life.
Thought in our college town did not keep pace with European centres of thought, as it does in our day. There was less hospitality toward foreign ideas. Few people visited Europe. Life in New England was thrown upon its own resources, and this was in great measure true of Cambridge in the days when it was eight miles from Boston, and indefinitely remote from the mother country. One of the surest results of social isolation is the acquirement of peculiarities of speech, often shown in the retaining of archaisms which fashionable language had dropped. That quaint Yankee dialect, of which Hosea Biglow says that,
"For puttin' in a downright lick 'Twixt Humbug's eyes, ther's few can metch it, An' then it helves my thoughts ez slick Ez stret-grained hickory doos a hetchet,"--
that dialect so sweet to the ears of every true child of New England may still be heard, if we go to seek it; but in Lowell's boyhood it must have been a familiar sound in the neighbourhood of Elmwood.
But the work done in this rustic college community, if done within somewhat narrow horizons, was eminently a widening and liberalizing work. The seeds of the nineteenth century were germinating in the eighteenth. Two or three indications must suffice, out of many that might be cited. In 1669 there was a schism in the First Parish of Boston, brought about by an attempt to revise the conditions of church membership, in order to obviate some of the difficulties arising from the restriction of the suffrage to church members, and the founding of the Old South Church by the more liberal party was a result of this schism. One hundred and sixty years later, in 1829, there was a schism in the First Parish of Cambridge, which resulted in the founding of the Shepard Church by the more conservative party. The questions at issue between the two parties were the questions that divide Unitarian theology from Trinitarian, and the distance between the kind of interests at stake in the earlier controversy and in the later may serve as a fair measure of the progress which the mind of Ma.s.sachusetts had been making during that interval of a hundred and sixty years. In all that time, the chief training school for the ministers by whom the speculative minds of Ma.s.sachusetts were stimulated and guided was Harvard College. But it was here, too, that men eminent in civic life were trained; and among the various ill.u.s.trations of the type thus nurtured may be cited Samuel Adams and Thomas Hutchinson, foemen worthy of one another, Warren and Hanc.o.c.k, Jonathan Trumbull and John Adams. So far as New England was concerned, the chief work in bringing on the Revolution was done by graduates of Harvard. In the convention which framed our Federal Const.i.tution, three important delegates were the Harvard men, Gerry, Strong, and King; and in this connection we cannot fail to recall names so closely a.s.sociated with our national beginnings as Timothy Pickering and Fisher Ames, nor can we omit the n.o.ble line of jurists from Parsons to Story, and so on to Curtis, whom so many of us well remember; or, going back to that Ma.s.sachusetts convention, of which the work is commemorated in the name of Federal Street, we may single out for mention the great minister and statesman, type of what is best in Puritanism, Samuel West, of New Bedford. Such names speak for the kind of quiet, un.o.btrusive work that was going on in Cambridge during those two centuries of rural existence. Such strengthening and unfolding of the spirit is the only work that is truly immortal. In a town like ours the material relics of the past are inspiring, and it is right that we should do our best to preserve them; but they are perishable. The gambrel-roofed house from the door of which President Langdon asked G.o.d's blessing upon the men that were starting for Bunker Hill, in later days the birthplace and homestead of our beloved Autocrat, has vanished from the scene; the venerable elm under which Washington drew the sword in defence of American liberty is slowly dying, year by year. But for the spiritual achievement that has marked the career of our community there is no death, and they that have turned many to righteousness shall shine in our firmament as the stars forever and ever.
In contrasting the Cambridge of the nineteenth with that of the two preceding centuries, the first fact which strikes our attention is the increase in the rate of growth. In 1680 the population of Cambridge seems to have been about 850, and the graduating cla.s.s for that year numbered five. In 1793 the population--not counting the parishes that have since become Brighton and Arlington--was about 1200, and there was a graduating cla.s.s of 38. Thus in more than a century the population had increased barely fifty per cent. In 1793 there were only four houses east of Dana Street, but that year witnessed an event of cardinal importance, the opening of West Boston Bridge. The distance between Boston and Old Cambridge was thus reduced from eight miles to three, and a direct avenue was opened between the interior of Middles.e.x County and the Boston markets. The effect was shown in doubling the population of Cambridge by the year 1809, when another bridge was completed from Lechmere Point to the north end of Boston. These were toll bridges, in the hands of private corporations, and their success led to further bridges,--the one at River Street in 1811, the one at Western Avenue in 1825, and Brookline Bridge so lately as 1850. The princ.i.p.al thoroughfares south and east of Old Cambridge were built as highways connecting with these bridges: thus River Street and Western Avenue were tributary to West Boston Bridge, and to that point the Concord Turnpike was prolonged by Broadway, the Middles.e.x Turnpike by Hampshire Street, and the Medford Road by Webster Avenue; while Cambridge Street, intersecting these avenues, formed a direct thoroughfare from the Concord and Watertown roads to the northern part of Boston. The completion of these important works led to projects for filling up the marshes and establishing docks in rivalry of Boston,--plans but very slightly realized before circ.u.mstances essentially changed them.
In this way, Cambridge, which had hitherto faced the Brighton mainland, turned its face toward the Boston peninsula, and two new villages began to grow up at "the Port" and "the Point," otherwise Cambridgeport and East Cambridge. It was not long before the new villages began in some ways to a.s.sert rivalry with the old one. The corporation which owned the bridge and large tracts of land at Lechmere Point naturally wished to increase the value of its real estate. Middles.e.x County needed a new courthouse and jail. In 1757 a new courthouse had been built on the site of Lyceum Hall, but in 1813 there was a need for something better; whereupon the Lechmere Point Corporation forthwith built a courthouse and jail in East Cambridge, and presented them, with the ground on which they stood, to the county. In 1818, a lot of land in the Port, bounded by Harvard, Prospect, Austin, and Norfolk streets, was appropriated for a poorhouse. Soon afterward it was proposed to inclose our common,--which with the lapse of time had shrunk to about its present size,--and to convert it from a grazing ground into an ornamental park.
The scheme met with vehement opposition, and the town meetings in this growing community suddenly became so large that the old courthouse in Harvard Square would not hold them. Accordingly, a bigger townhouse was built in 1832 on the eastern part of the poorhouse lot, and thus was the civic centre removed from Old Cambridge.
This event served to emphasize the state of things which had been growing up with increasing rapidity since the beginning of the century.
Instead of a single village, with a single circle of interests, there were now three villages, with interests diverse and sometimes conflicting as regards the expending of public money, so that feelings of sectional antagonism were developed.
In New England history, the usual remedy for such a state of things has been what might be called "spontaneous fission." The overgrown town would divide into three, and the segments would go on pouting at each other as independent neighbours. We need not be surprised to learn that in 1842 the people of Old Cambridge pet.i.tioned to be set off as a separate town; but this attempt was successfully opposed, with the result that in 1846 a city government was adopted. In that year the population had reached 13,000, and was approaching the point at which town meetings become unmanageable from sheer bulk. For small communities, Thomas Jefferson was probably right in holding that the town meeting is the best form of government ever devised by man. It was certainly the form best loved in New England down to 1822, when Boston, with its population of 40,000, reluctantly gave it up, and adopted a representative government instead. The example of Boston was followed in 1836 by Salem and Lowell, and next in 1846 by Roxbury and Cambridge.
From that time forth the making of cities went on more rapidly. It was the beginning of a period of urban development, the end of which we cannot as yet even dimly foresee. This unprecedented growth of cities is sometimes spoken of as peculiarly American, but it is indeed not less remarkable in Europe, and it extends over the world so far as the influence of railroad and telegraph extends. The influence of these agencies of communication serves to diffuse over wide areas the effects wrought by machinery at different centres of production. With increased demand for human energy, the earth's power of sustaining human life has vastly increased, and there is a strong tendency to congregate about centres of production and exchange. In 1846 there were but five cities in the United States with a population exceeding 100,000; New York had not yet reached half a million. To-day New York is approaching the two-million mark, three other cities[28] have pa.s.sed the million, and not less than thirty have pa.s.sed the hundred-thousand. During this half century the 13,000 of Cambridge have increased to more than 80,000. The Cambridge of to-day contains as many people as the Boston of sixty years ago.