relieved the Court from the embarrassment of retracing its steps against him; and a vote was passed for remitting the fine and costs to which he had been condemned in the former proceedings. June 2. Compara tive quiet later ad ministra tion. He In the last half of Dudley's administration, the collisions between him and the elected government of Massachusetts were to a great degree suspended by of Dudley's the cares incident, first to the war, and then to its calamitous consequences. He had been hopelessly defeated as to the objects which in entering on his office he had obstinately insisted on. The General Court would not build a fort at Pemaquid; they would not contribute to the cost of the fort at Portsmouth; and, above all, they would not fix salaries for the Governor and Judges. The grant of five hundred pounds, which in the latter years of Dudley's service they made him annually, was a much smaller allowance than they had given to his predecessor, Lord Bellomont; and he had made up his mind to approve the votes, and take the money without remonstrance. no longer indulged himself in obstructing the Representatives' choice of a Speaker, and they no longer complained when he gratified his grudges by rejecting Counsellors of their choice. Resentments do not last for ever in their full fierceness, when the mutually angry parties come to have interests in common; and, though the elder contemporaries of Dudley could not be expected to forget the character of his important career sufficiently to extend to him respect. or confidence, yet it was not a time for them to seek or use occasions for quarrel, when, distressed by a French and Indian war, they found him conducting their military affairs with activity, and, on the whole, not without good judgment, if with indifferent success. They were assured by some of their English friends that if they got rid of him they would be likely to fare worse, and that they would do well to reconcile themselves to his rule on the principle enforced in the ancient fable, that half-gorged Loyalty in setts. bloodsuckers are more tolerable than a fresh and more hungry swarm. And if at present it was for his interest to practise those arts of insinuation of which he was a master, on the other hand nothing is more depressing to the pride and spirit of a community than the financial difficulties which were now weighing more heavily every day; and to Dudley's boldness and resource men willingly looked for such means of extrication as might be possible. Nor was Massachusetts now in the same restless mood as at some other times. In the quarter-century which had passed since the abrogation of the old Massachucharter, a generation had come upon the stage of active life, not trained in the maxims of independence so dear to her in earlier days. In their minds, the foreign sovereign was recognized with a reality with which he had not been conceived in the minds of the fathers since English Massachusetts had a being. When the Charleses had claimed and threatened, she had denied, "avoided," and kept quiet, waiting her time. When Cromwell had attempted to cajole, she had excused herself with a decision which he had sense and sympathy to understand. But now English Puritanism had been, after a feeble fashion, indulged and conciliated by the crown; and Massachusetts Puritanism as to its antagonistic attitude, at least - had lost its powerful backing in the parent country. It was not the time for Puritan Massachusetts to be contumacious and impracticable when the Protestant sovereigns, William and Anne, had come to hold the British throne by election against the legitimate Popish monarchs of the Stuart line, and the Act of Settlement which gave the crown to the House of Hanover had made a still wider departure from the hereditary principle. In the new circumstances, loyalty had become a virtue and a genuine sentiment; and if the object of such loyalty turned it to advantage by putting hard tasks upon it and summoning it to inconvenient submission, that was no new experience in the history of sov ereigns and of sentimental subjects. King William and Queen Anne, and the ministers of both, had as little positive liking for Massachusetts as the line of tyrants which they superseded; and practically Massachusetts had the less power of self-defence against them because of their being in theory less unfavorably disposed to her and to her well-wishers in England. 1713. Population, Governor Hutchinson entertained the opinion that at the time of the Treaty of Utrecht "there was not double the number of inhabitants in the Massachusetts Province, which the Colonies of which it was formed contained fifty years before," while the people of the other Colonies had quadrupled their numbers in the same time; and he ascribes this slow growth to industry, the wars which, with only two short intermissions, and trade. had been going on through the forty years since the outbreak under Philip of Pokanoket. Within that time he calculates that "five or six thousand of the youth of the country had perished by the enemy, or by distempers contracted in the service." He supposes that the expenses of Massachusetts in this, called Queen Anne's War, "were beyond those of any other ten years from the first settlement," and that the military operations " added to the support of civil government, without any relief or compensation from the crown, certainly must have occasioned such an annual burden as was not felt by any other subjects of Great Britain." 1 In the seventh year of his administration Dudley reported to the Lords of Trade: "I judge this Province to contain, when I arrived, fifty thousand souls. These are all freemen and their children, besides the blacks. This number is increased by a thousand every year, . . the wars and troubles with the Indians 1 Hutch. Hist., II. 201. - Supposing my estimates of the population of Massachusetts and Plymouth in 1665 (see above, Vols. III. 35, IV. 135) to be correct, the estimates of Dudley for 1702, and of Hutchinson for 1713, would agree sufficiently well with them and with one another. notwithstanding. . . The people here clothe themselves with their own wool. New English goods are here sold at less than a hundred and fifty pounds per cent advance; most goods more.. They are proud enough to wear the best cloth of England, if chopping, sawing, and building of ships would pay for their clothes, and this method would double the sale of English woollen manufactory presently.. There is no trade to the coast of Guinea." Massachusetts, he reported, had twenty ships of over a hundred tons' burden; sixty of between fifty and a hundred; and a hundred and twenty smaller vessels for trade to the West Indies, "which must demand a thousand sailors, as near as I can set it, besides a like number of all sorts built every two years for merchants of London and elsewhere." "This Province has all sorts of manufactures settled that belong to iron, leather, linen, though to no degree capable to serve the inhabitants as yet." There was an exportation of codfish to Spain and elsewhere to the amount of £30,000 annually, and of mackerel to the West Indies to the amount of £5,000. Three years later he wrote: "The revenue of both the Provinces [Massachusetts and New Hampshire] consists of an impost for goods and merchandise April 8. brought in, an excise upon taverns and retailers of wines and liquors, and a land and poll tax laid once a year." 1712. In Governor Dudley's time, an Act of Parliament was passed, of which the important political bearing 1710. does not seem to have been weighed either by the government at home or by the colonists. It provided for erecting a General Post-Office in all the Queen's dominions, and for settling a weekly sum out of it arrange for the service of the war and other occasions.3 1 Various particulars of the commerce of Boston in 1709 are contained in an account by an English visitor to that place, published in the Historical Magazine for 1866, Supple Post-office ments. ment, II. 119; comp. N. HI. Hist. Col., III. 140. 2 British Colonial Papers. 3 Statutes at Large; Act of the 9th of Anne, Chap. X. Those times Some rude arrangements had been early made in New England for the transmission of correspondence. When 1672. 2 1639. a few years had passed after the first settlement Nov. 5. in Massachusetts, the General Court appointed Richard Fairbanks of Boston to take care of letters "brought from beyond the seas or to be sent thither," and to receive a penny for each, "provided that no man be compelled to bring his letters thither except he please."1 After thirty years, as communications improved, arrangements were made for a mail to leave New York for Boston the first Monday of every month. A little later, on a petition from merchants and others, who complained that their letters were "many times May 23. imposted and thrown upon the Exchange, so that who will may take them up, . . whereby merchants especially, with their friends and employers in foreign parts, were greatly damnified," the General Court made choice of a postmaster "to take in and convey letters according to their direction." 3 At the Revolution, Randolph's function having ceased, the General Court June 11. appointed Mr. Richard Wilkins "for postmaster, to receive all letters and deliver them out; to receive one 1677. 1689. 1691. penny for each single letter."4 When William and Mary had been two years on the throne, they gave by Feb. 17. patent under the great seal, "unto Thomas Neale, Esq., his executors, administrators, and assigns, full power and authority to erect, settle, and establish within the chief ports of their Majesties' Colonies and Plantations in America an office or offices for the receiving and despatching letters and packets;" to be paid, however, for his services by "such rates and sums of money as the planters should agree to give." 5 are not commonly thought to have been scrupulous; yet the last section of this Act forbids the interference of postmasters in elections. 1 Mass Prov. Rec. 2 Brodhead, New York, II. 196. Mass. Prov. Rec. • Ibid. 5 Mass. Hist. Col., XXVII. 50. |