trade.
Ship-building was an early industry, and New England ships vied with
the ships of Holland and England in visiting distant countries for
commerce.[9] Manufacturing found early encouragement, and in 1639 a
number of clothiers from Yorkshire set up a fulling-mill at
Rowley.[10] A glass factory was established at Salem in 1641,[11] and
iron works at Lynn in 1643,[12] under the management of Joseph Jenks.
The keenness of the New-Englander in bargains and business became
famous.

In Massachusetts the town was the unit of representation and taxation,
and in local matters it governed itself. The first town government
appears to have been that of Dorchester, where the inhabitants agreed,
October 8, 1633, to hold a weekly meeting "to settle and sett down
such orders as may tend to the general good."[13] Not long after a
similar meeting was held in Watertown, and the system speedily spread
to the other towns. The plan of appointing a body of "townsmen," or
selectmen, to sit between meetings of the towns began in February,
1635, in Charlestown.[14]

The town-meeting had a great variety of business. It elected the town
officers and the deputies to the general court and made ordinances
regarding the common fields and pastures, the management of the
village herds, roadways, boundary-lines, fences, and many other
things. Qualified to share in the deliberations were all freemen and
"admitted inhabitants of honest and good conversation" rated at L20
(equivalent to about $500 to-day).[15]

In the prevalence of the town system popular education was rendered
possible, and a great epoch in the history of social progress was
reached when Massachusetts recognized the support of education as a
proper function of government. Boston had a school with some sort of
public encouragement in 1635,[16] and in 1642, before schools were
required by law, it was enjoined upon the selectmen to "take account
from time to time of parents and masters of the ability of the
children to read and understand the principles of religion and the
capital lawes of the country."[17] In November, 1647, a general
educational law required every town having fifty householders or more
to appoint some one to teach children how to read and write, and every
town having one hundred householders or more to establish a "grammar
(Latin) school" to instruct youth "so far as may be fitted for the
university."[18]

In 1636 the Massachusetts assembly agreed to give L400 to