overlooked; he was accused of
lying and also of stealing. He had been whipped for these offences, but
refused to come before the church for wholesome discipline, and ran away
out of the jurisdiction. Accordingly he was "disowned from his church
relation and excommunicated, though not deliuered up to Satan, as those
in full communion, but yet to be looked at as a Heathen and a Publican
unto his relations natural and civil, that he might be ashamed."

Another class of statutes--laws that have a queer sound in
nineteenth-century Massachusetts--were designed for the encouragement of
special public service. Here are examples of some of them:

"1638. For the better encouragement of any that shall destroy wolves,
it is ordered that for every wolf any man shall take in Dorchester
plantation, he shall have 20's by the town, for the first wolf, 15's
for the second, and for every wolf afterwards, 10's besides the
Country's pay."

"1736. Voted, that whosoever shall kill brown rats, so much grown as
to have their hair on them, within y'e town of Dochester, y'e year
ensuing, until our meeting in May next, and bring in their scalps
with y'e ears on unto y'e town treasurer, shall be paid by y'e town
treasurer Fourpence for every rat's scalp."

The same year the town offered a bounty for the destroying of striped
squirrels.

Now that the recent death of Wendell Phillips brings freshly to mind the
bitter opposition with which the early champions of abolution were
treated in Boston and vicinity, it is pleasant to find in the musty
records of the Dochester Plantation emphatic evidence that they not only
recognized slavery as an evil, and the slave-trade as a heinous crime,
but that they set their faces like a flint against it. The traffic in
slaves began among the colonists in the winter of 1645-6, and in the
following November the court placed on record this outspoken
denunciation of the practice:

"The Gen'all Co'te conceiving themselves bound by y'e first opertunity
to bear Witness against y'e haynos & crying sin of man stealing, as also
to prscribe such timely redresse for what is past, and such a law for
y'e future as may sufficiently deter all others belonging to us to have
to do in such vile and odious courses, iustly abhored of all good and
iust men, do order y't y'e negro interpreter w'th others unlawfully
taken, be y'e first opertunity (at y'e charge of y'e country for psent),
sen