Proceedings on the Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Permanent Settlement of Weymouth (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1874 Excerpt: ...of the other (twin) a youngest daughter of the widow Ruth Harvey, and put it out as reasonably as they can." The following also has a strange sound to modern ears, from the Record of March 11th, 1771: "Voted to sell the Poor that are maintained by the town for this present year at a Vendue to the lowest bidder." Records (v. 1, pp. 318, 438). We are always accustomed to regard the past as a better and purer time than the present, --there is a vague, traditional simplicity and innocence hanging about it almost Arcadian in'character. I can find no ground on which to base this pleasant fancy. Taken altogether I do not believe that the morals of Weymouth or of her sister towns were on the average as good in the eighteenth century as in the nineteenth. The people were sterner and graver, --the law and the magistrate were more severe, but human nature was the same and would have vent. There was, I am inclined to think, more hypocrisy in those days than now, but I have seen nothing which has led me to believe that the women were more chaste, or that the men were more temperate, or that, in proportion to population, fewer or less degrading crimes were perpetrated. Certainly the earlier generations were as a race not so charitable as their descendants, and less of a spirit of kindly Christianity prevailed among them. But in those days enjoyment itself was almost a crime, and every pleasure was thought to be a lure of the devil and close upon the boundary line to guilt. Holidays, accordingly, were few and far between. The May-pole disappeared with the wild Morton of Merry Mount. During the colonial period, election'or training day was what the Fourth of July is to us, --the great anniversary of the year, on which the whole community came as near to unbendi...