rs, had
fallen into such decay that extinction was inevitable, had not the
people of another Colony come to the rescue. The town of Portsmouth, in
New Hampshire, hearing, says their address, "the loud groans of the
sinking College,... and hoping that their example might provoke ... the
General Court vigorously to act for the diverting of the omen of
calamity which its destruction would be to New England," pledged
themselves to an annual contribution of sixty pounds for seven years.
This act of chivalrous generosity fairly shamed our lagging Commonwealth
into measures for the resuscitation of an institution especially
committed to its care.

The most remarkable feature of this business is that the Province all
this while was drawing, not only moral support, but pecuniary aid, from
the College. "It is manifest," says Quincy,[A] "that the treasury of
the Colony, having been the recipient of many of the early donations to
the College, was not a little aided by the convenience which these
available funds afforded to its pecuniary necessities. Some of these
funds, although received in 1647, were not paid over to the treasury of
the College until 1713; then, indeed, the College received an allowance
of simple interest for the delay. With regard, therefore, to the annual
allowance of L100, whereby," during the first seventy years, "they
enabled the President of the College simply to exist, it is proper to
observe, that there was not probably one year in the whole seventy in
which, by moneys collected from friends of the institution in foreign
countries, by donations of its friends in this country, by moneys
brought by students from other Colonies, and above all by furnishing the
means of education at home, and thus preventing the outgoing of domestic
wealth for education abroad, the College did not remunerate the Colony
for that poor annual stipend five hundred fold."

The patronage extended to the College after the Revolution was not more
cordial and not more adequate than the meagre succors of Colonial
legislation. The first Governor of independent Massachusetts, from the
height of his impregnable popularity, for more than twelve years defied
the repeated attempts of the Corporation, backed by the Overseers, to
obtain the balance of his account as former Treasurer of the College,
and died its debtor in a sum exceeding a thousand pounds. The debt was
finally paid by his heirs, but not without a loss of some hundreds of
dolla