Friday, at the ball I long tarried;
And Saturday to the poor-house was carried.
Moral.—Paper Laws are not as trustworthy as, although more shiny than, specie.
The experiments of the colonists thus early in engraved promises showed how adventurous and hopeful they had become. The unfavorable results did not indent their faith. There was always a side-pocket for American losses. In this they clapped their broken bank-bills, and John Law’s handsome certificates with the wonderful figures that had “cut so many shines,” and went on. The building of a few rice-machines, sugar-mills, or school-houses were checked for a few months; the clearing of some lots was less rapid; the purchase of a new gown for Prudence, or a new waistcoat for John Smith’s great-great-grandson, postponed; but the subscriptions to the Boston “News-Letter” did not fall off, nor the Franklin loaf diminish in weight.
There was one important branch of American industry and wealth which actually increased most during the severest periods of financial losses, the manufacturing of children. At the close of Queen Anne’s war, in 1713, the Colonies had a population of four hundred thousand,—an increase of one hundred and sixty-five thousand since the bars were let down. This population doubled during the next thirty years.
So many new boys coming forward required of course more training. A long-sighted governor of the East Indies, Elihu Yale by name, reached a hand across the seas, and placed some books and a little money at the feet of a few wise-hearted men in Connecticut, who took them up, and planted them for a few years at Saybrook. The gits thriving well, they were transplanted to New Haven. Everybody knows how these mustard shoots have grown; how their sturdy arms ever keep touching the westering borders, dropping schoolmistresses on Southern soils, ministers on Western prairies, spicy editors for city sandwiches; even their dead branches enriching the deep soils of scientific and theologic thought.
The Schoolmaster abroad.
(p. 201)
The planting of schools increased. It was always a favorite branch of American husbandry. The schoolhouse was frequently the first seedling put in. Now more carefully fenced about, it became the quercus giganteus Americanus,—to our plantations what the British oak is on an English estate, the glorious spike that rivets it to the wave-rocked island. Birch-trees could hardly supply the colonial demand upon them. School-girls opened the slate-quarries for chewing-pencils, and stripped the spruce-trees for gum. Knowest thou not, O reader, what a close connection there is between pencil and gum chewing and female education? If not, thou hast not been blessed with sisters between the liquid ages of fourteen and seventeen, and must hasten to study female geology, which embeds between its slaty folds the beautiful ferns and flora of knowledge. Thou must betake thyself to the nearest seminary, and observe the sudden and deep openings down through slate-lined shafts into the mines of earthly learning.