Public Institutions.—Massachusetts was in 1903, in proportion to the population, more richly provided with public collections of books than any other state: in that year she had nearly a seventh of all books in public, society and school libraries in the country, and a much larger supply of books per capita (2.56) than any other state. The rate for New York, the only state having a larger number of books in such libraries, being only 1.19. The Boston public library, exceeded in size in the United States by the library of Congress at Washington—and probably first, because of the large number of duplicates in the library of Congress—and the largest free municipal library in the world; the library of Harvard, extremely well chosen and valuable for research; the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society (1791); the Boston Athenaeum (1807); the State Library (1826); the New England Historic Genealogical Society (1845); the Congregational Library; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1780); and the Boston Society of Natural History (1830), all in Boston, leave it easily unrivalled, unless by Washington, as the best research centre of the country. The collections of the American Antiquarian Society (1812) at Worcester are also notable. Massachusetts led, about 1850, in the founding of town and city libraries supported by public taxes, and by 1880 had established more of such institutions than existed in all other states combined. In 1900 out of 353 towns and cities only five, representing less than half of 1%, were without free library facilities, and three of these five had association libraries charging only a small fee.
The state is very well supplied with charitable and reformatory institutions, in which noteworthy methods have been employed with success. The state institutions, each governed by a board of trustees, and all under the supervision of the state board of charity, include a state hospital at Tewksbury, for paupers (1866); a state farm at Bridgewater (1887) for paupers and petty criminals; the Lyman school for boys at Westboro, a reformatory for male criminals under fifteen years of age sentenced to imprisonment for terms less than life in connexion with which a very successful farm is maintained for the younger boys at Berlin; an industrial school for girls at Lancaster, also a reformatory school—a third reformatory school for boys was planned in 1909; a state sanatorium at Rutland for tuberculous patients (the first public hospital for such in the United States) and a hospital school at Canton for the care and instruction of crippled and deformed children. Three more hospitals for consumptives were planned in 1909. Under the supervision of the state board of insanity, and each under the government of a board of seven trustees (of whom two are women) are state hospitals for the insane at Worcester (1833), Taunton, Northampton, Danvers, Westboro and Medford, a state colony for the insane at Gardner, a state hospital for epileptics at Palmer, a state school for the feeble-minded at Waltham (governed by six trustees), a state school at Wrentham, state “hospital cottages for children” (1882) at Baldwinville (governed by five trustees), and the Foxboro state hospital for dipsomaniacs and insane. There are also semi-state institutions for the insane at Waverley, Barre, Wrentham and Baldwinville, and nineteen small private institutions, all under the supervision of the state board of insanity. Under the supervision of a board of prison commissioners, which appoints the superintendent and warden of each, are a reformatory prison for women at Sherborn (1877), a state reformatory for men at Concord (1884), a state prison at Boston (Charlestown), and a prison camp and hospital at Rutland (1905). There is a prison department at the state farm which receives misdemeanants. Other institutions receiving state aid, each governed by trustees appointed by the governor, are the Massachusetts general hospital at Boston, the Massachusetts charitable eye and ear infirmary at Boston, the Massachusetts homoeopathic hospital at Boston, the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts school for the blind at South Boston and the soldiers’ home in Massachusetts at Boston. The Horace Mann school in Boston, a public day school for the deaf, the New England industrial school for deaf mutes at Beverly and the Clarke school for the deaf at Northampton are maintained in part by the state. Finally, many private charitable corporations (about 500 in 1905) report to the state board of charity, and town and city almshouses (205 in 1904) are subject to visitation. The Perkins Institution is memorable for its association with the fame of S. G. Howe (g.v.), whose reforms in charity methods were felt through all the charitable interests of the state. The net yearly cost of support and relief from 1884 to 1904 averaged $2,136,653, exclusive of vagrancy cases (average $31,714). The whole number of paupers, besides vagrants, in 1908 was 23.02 per 1000 of state population, and the cost of relief ($5,104,255) was $1.699 for each inhabitant of the state. The number of sane paupers declined steadily and markedly from 1863 to 1904.
Finance.—Massachusetts is a very rich state, and Boston a very wealthy city. The debt of the state (especially the contingent debt, secured by sinking funds) has been steadily rising since 1888, and especially since 1896, chiefly owing to the erection of important public buildings, the construction of state highways and metropolitan park roadways, the improvement of Boston harbour, the abolition of grade crossings on railways, and the expenses incurred for the Spanish-American War of 1898.
The net direct funded debt (also secured by accumulating sinking funds) in December 1908 was $17,669,372 (3.61 millions in 1893). The average interest on this and the contingent debt ($60,428,223 in December 1908) combined was only 3.35%. The net debts of towns and cities rose in the years 1885-1908 from $63,306,213 to $163,558,325. The county debts in 1908 aggregated $6,076,867. The assessed valuation of realty in the state in 1908 was $2,799,062,707 and of personalty $1,775,073,438. No other state has given so vigorous a test of the ordinary American general-property tax, and the results have been as discouraging as elsewhere. The “dooming” process (i.e. estimation by assessors, without relief for overvaluation except for excess more than 50% above the proper valuation) was introduced in 1868 as a method of securing returns of personalty. But the most rigorous application of the doomage law has only proved its complete futility as an effort to reach unascertained corporate and personal property.[20] Various special methods are used for the taxation of banks, insurance companies, railways, tramways, trust companies and corporations, some of them noteworthy. In the case of corporations realty and machinery are taxed generally by the local authorities, and stock values by the commonwealth. The Boston stock exchange is the second of the country in the extent of the securities in which it deals. The proportion of holders of U.S. bonds among the total population is higher than that in any other state.
History.—It is possible that the coasts of Massachusetts were visited by the Northmen, and by the earliest navigators who followed Cabot, but this is only conjecture. In 1602 Bartholomew Gosnold landed at and named Cape Cod and coasted as far south as the present No-Man’s Land, which he named Martin’s or Martha’s Vineyard, a name later transferred to a neighbouring larger island. Pring and Champlain at a later date coasted along what is now Massachusetts, but the map of Champlain is hardly recognizable. The first sufficient explorations for cartographical record were made by John Smith in 1614, and his map was long the basis—particularly in its nomenclature—of later maps. Permanency of occupation, however, dates from the voyage of the “Mayflower,” which brought about a hundred men, women and children who had mostly belonged to an English sect of Separatists, originating in Yorkshire, but who had passed a period of exile for religion’s sake in Holland. In the early winter of 1620 they made the coast of Cape Cod; they had intended to make their landing farther south, within the jurisdiction of the Virginia Company, which had granted them a patent; but stress of weather prevented their doing so. Finding themselves without warrant in a region beyond their patent, and threatened with the desertion of disaffected members of their company (probably all servants or men of the “lesser” sort) unless concessions were made to these, they drew up and signed before landing a democratic compact of government which is accounted the earliest written constitution in history.[21] After some exploration of the coast they made a permanent landing on the 21st of December 1620 (N.S.) at Plymouth, a harbour which had already been so named by John Smith in his maps of 1614 and 1616. During the first winter nearly one-half their number died from exposure, and the relations of the survivors with their partners of the London Company, who had insisted that for seven years the plantation should be managed as a joint stock company, were unsatisfactory. However, about thirty-five new colonists arrived in 1622 and ninety-six more in 1623. The abandonment of the communal system was begun in the latter year, and with the dissolution of the partnership with the adventurers of the London Company in 1627 Plymouth became a corporate colony with its chief authority vested in the whole body of freemen convened in the General Court. Upon the death of the first governor, John Carver, in the spring of 1621, the General Court chose William Bradford as his successor, and with him was chosen one assistant. The subsequent elections were annual, and within a few years the number of assistants was increased to seven. The General Court was the legislature and the electorate; the governor and assistants were the executive and the judiciary. The whole body of freemen composed the General Court until other towns than Plymouth had been organized, the first of which were Scituate in 1636 and Duxbury in 1637, and then the representative form of government was adopted and there was a gradual differentiation between Plymouth the town and Plymouth the colony. When it had become known that the colony was within the territory of the New England Council, John Pierce, in 1621, procured from that body a grant which made the colonists its tenants. A year later Pierce surrendered this and procured another, which in effect made him proprietor of the colony, but he was twice shipwrecked and was forced to assign to the adventurers his second patent. In 1629 Governor Bradford procured from the same council a definite grant of the tract which corresponds to the south-eastern portion of the present state. But all attempts to procure a royal charter for Plymouth Colony were unsuccessful, and in 1691 it was annexed to the Colony of Massachusetts Bay under what is termed the Provincial Charter.
King James having by patent in 1620 created a Council for New England to whom he made a large grant of territory, the council in 1628 made a sub-grant, confirmed by a royal charter that passed the seals on the 4th of March 1629, to the “Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in Newe England.” There had been various minor expeditions during the few years since Smith was on the coast before this company, in the Puritan interests, had sent over John Endecott with a party in 1628 to what is now Salem. In 1630 the government of the company, with questionable right (for the charter seems evidently to have contemplated the residence of the company in England), transferred itself to their territory, and under the leadership of John Winthrop laid the foundations anew of the Massachusetts colony, when they first settled Boston in the autumn of that year. Winthrop served repeatedly, though not continuously, as governor of the colony till his death in 1649, his rejection in 1636 being due to a party of theological revolt which chose Henry Vane (afterwards Sir Henry) to the office. This was an incident in a famous episode, important rather as a symptom than in itself, namely, the Antinomian controversy, “New England’s earliest protest against formulas,” in which Vane and Ann Hutchinson took the lead in criticizing the official orthodoxy of the colony.
The magistrates successfully asserted themselves to the discomfiture of their critics (Ann Hutchinson being banished), and this was characteristic of the colony’s early history. The charter gave the company control over the admission of “freemen” (co-partners in the enterprise, and voters), “full and absolute power and authority to correct, punish and rule” subjects settling in the territory comprised in their grant, and power to “resist ... by all fitting ways and means whatever” all persons attempting the “destruction, invasion, detriment or annoyance” of the plantation. Some writers deny the company’s right under this instrument to rule as they proceeded to do; but at any rate what they did was to make the suffrage dependent on stringent religious tests, and to repress with determined zeal all theological “vagaries” and “whimsies.” Criticism of church or magistrates was not tolerated. Laws were modelled closely on the Bible. The clergy were a ruling class. The government was frankly theocratic. Said Winthrop (1637): “We see not that any should have authority to set up any other exercises besides what authority hath already set up”; and a synod at Cambridge in 1637 catalogued eighty-two “opinions, some blasphemous, others erroneous and all unsafe,” besides nine “unwholesome expressions,” all of which were consigned “to the devil of hell from whence they came.” Another synod at Cambridge in 1647 more formally established the principle of state control. The legislation against Baptists (about 1644-1678) and the persecution of the Quakers (especially 1656-1662) partook of the brutality of the time, including scourging, boring of tongues, cutting of ears and in rare cases capital punishment. It cannot be denied that men like Roger Williams and some of the persecuted Quakers, though undeniably contentious and aggressive in their conscientious dissent, showed a spirit which to-day seems sweeter in tolerance and humanity than that of the Puritans. And it seems necessary to emphasize these facts because until about 1870 it was almost unchallenged tradition to regard the men of Massachusetts Bay as seekers and champions of “religious liberty.” They left England, indeed, for liberty to discard the “poperies” of the English Church, and once in Massachusetts they even discarded far more than those “poperies.” But religious liberty in our modern sense they did not seek for themselves, nor accord to others; they abhorred it, they trampled on it, and their own lives they subjected to all the rigid restrictions to which they subjected others. They were narrow but strong; no better example can be imagined of what the French call “the defects of one’s qualities.” Their failures were small compared with those of their contemporaries in England and elsewhere in Europe, and public opinion did not long sustain violent persecution of opinion. More than once mobs freed Quaker prisoners. Also it is to be said that with the single exception of religious toleration the record of the state in devotion to human rights has been from the first a splendid one, whether in human principles of criminal law, or in the defence of the civil rights commonly declared in American constitutions. It was once generally assumed that the repression practised attained its end of securing harmony of opinion. The fact seems to be that intellectual speculation was as strong in America as in Puritan England; the assumption that the inhibition of its expression was good seems wholly gratuitous, and contrary to general convictions underlying modern freedom of speech. A safer opinion is probably that “the spiritual growth of Massachusetts withered under the shadow of dominant orthodoxy; the colony was only saved from mental atrophy by its vigorous political life” (J. A. Doyle). In literature the second half of the 17th century is a sterile waste of forbidding theology; and its life, judged by the present day, singularly sombre.
In addition to the few persons banished to Rhode Island, theological and political differences led many to emigrate thither. Others, discontented with Massachusetts autocracy and wishing, too, “to secure more room,” went to Connecticut (q.v.) where they established a bulwark against the Dutch of New York.
A witchcraft scare (at its worst in 1691-1697, though the earliest Connecticut case was in 1646-1647 and the earliest in Boston in 1648) led to another tragedy of ignorance. In all thirty-two persons were executed (according to W. F. Poole, about a thousandth part of those executed for witchcraft in the British Isles in the 16th and 17th centuries). Salem was the scene of the greatest excitement in 1691-1692.
Exceptionally honourable to the early colonists was their devotion to education (see [Harvard University] and [Boston]). Massachusetts Bay had a large learned element; it is supposed that about 1640 there was an Oxford or Cambridge graduate to every 250 persons in the colony. The earliest printing in the British-American colonies was done at Cambridge in 1639; it was not until 1674 that the authorities of the colony permitted printing, except at Cambridge. Boston and Cambridge remain leading publishing centres to-day. The first regular newspaper of Boston, the Boston Newsletter, was the pioneer of the American newspaper press.