CAMBRIDGE

      AS VILLAGE AND CITY

      By John Fiske

      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 pronounce 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 Hellas 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 massacres 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 Massachusetts, 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." Circumstances 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 circumstances 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 institutions; 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 Massachusetts Bay in order to put into practice a theory of civil government in which the interests both of liberty and of godliness 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 Massachusetts 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 Assistants (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 assembled. 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 Massachusetts. 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 Assistants 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 Assistants 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