and retained half of the new grant; but it should
be added that they paid the go-ers a sum of money to facilitate the
settlement.

This absentee proprietorship and the commercial attitude toward the
lands of new towns became more evident in succeeding years of the
eighteenth century. Leicester, for example, was confirmed by the General
Court in 1713. The twenty shares were divided among twenty-two
proprietors, including Jeremiah Dummer, Paul Dudley (Attorney-General),
William Dudley (like Paul a son of the Governor, Joseph Dudley), Thomas
Hutchinson (father of the later Governor), John Clark (the political
leader), and Samuel Sewall (son of the Chief Justice). These were all
men of influence, and none of the proprietors became inhabitants of
Leicester. The proprietors tried to induce the fifty families, whose
settlement was one of the conditions on which the grant was made, to
occupy the eastern half of the township reserving the rest as their
absolute property.[59:2]

The author of a currency tract, in 1716, entitled "Some Considerations
upon the Several Sorts of Banks," remarks that formerly, when land was
easy to be obtained, good men came over as indentured servants; but now,
he says, they are runaways, thieves, and disorderly persons. The remedy
for this, in his opinion, would be to induce servants to come over by
offering them homes when the terms of indenture should expire.[60:1] He
therefore advocates that townships should be laid out four or five miles
square in which grants of fifty or sixty acres could be made to
servants.[60:2] Concern over the increase of negro slaves in
Massachusetts seems to have been the reason for this proposal. It
indicates that the current practice in disposing of the lands did not
provide for the poorer people.

But Massachusetts did not follow this suggestion of a homestead policy.
On the contrary, the desire to locate towns to create continuous lines
of settlement along the roads between the disconnected frontiers and to
protect boundary claims by granting tiers of towns in the disputed
tract, as well, no doubt, as pressure from financial interests, led the
General Court between 1715 and 1762 to dispose of the remaining public
domain of Massachusetts under conditions that made speculation and
colonization by capitalists important factors.[60:3] When in 1762
Massachusetts sold a group of townships in the Berkshires to the highest
bidders (by whole townships),[60:4] the transfer