history of past relations between the Commonwealth and the
University that should make us regret the change. That history has not
been one of mere benefactions on one side, and pure indebtedness on the
other. Whatever the University may owe to the State, the balance of
obligation falls heavily on the other side. In the days of Provincial
rule the Colony of Massachusetts Bay appears to have exhausted its zeal
for collegiate education in the much-lauded promissory act by which the
General Court, in 1636, "agree to give four hundred pounds towards a
school or college, whereof two hundred pounds shall be paid next year."
The promise was not fulfilled, and the record of those years leaves it
doubtful whether legislative action alone would during that or the next
generation have accomplished the work, had not a graduate of Emanuel
College in English Cambridge, who seems providentially enough to have
dropped on these shores, where he lived but a year, for that express
purpose, supplied the requisite funds.

The College once started and got under way, the fathers of the Province
assumed a vigilant oversight of its orthodoxy, but discharged with a lax
and grudging service the responsibility of its maintenance. They ejected
the first President, the protomartyr of American learning, the man who
sacrificed more to the College than any one individual in the whole
course of its history, on account of certain scruples about infant
baptism, of which, in the language of the time, "it was not hard to
discover that they came from the Evil One," and for which poor Dunster
was indicted by the grand-jury, sentenced to a public admonition, and
laid under bonds for good behavior.

They starved the second President for eighteen years on a salary payable
in Indian corn; and in answer to his earnest prayer for relief, alleging
instant necessity, the sacrifice of personal property, and the custom of
English universities, a committee of the General Court reported that
"they conceive the country to have done honorably toward the petitioner,
and that his parity with English colleges is not pertinent."

The third President, by their connivance and co-operation, was
sacrificed to the machinations of the students, egged on, it is thought,
by members of the Corporation, and died, "as was said, with a broken
heart."

Meanwhile, through neglect of the Province to provide for its support,
the material fortunes of the College, in the course of thirty yea