arings and helped to make ready the land for the ploughman. Political
meetings were held, justice was administered by magistrates after old
English precedents, and church services were performed by a score of
clergymen, nearly all graduates of Cambridge, though one or two had
their degrees from Oxford, and nearly all of whom had held livings in
the Church of England. The most distinguished of these clergymen, John
Cotton, in his younger days a Fellow and Tutor of Emmanuel College, had
for more than twenty years been rector of St. Botolph's, when he left
the most magnificent parish church in England to hold service in the
first rude meeting-house of the new Boston. From Emmanuel College came
also Thomas Hooker and John Harvard. Besides these clergymen, so many of
the leading persons concerned in the emigration were university men that
it was not long before a university began to seem indispensable to
the colony. In 1636 the General Court appropriated L400 toward the
establishment of a college at Newtown. In 1638 John Harvard, dying
childless, bequeathed his library and the half of his estate to the new
college, which the Court forthwith ordered to be called by his name;
while in honour of the mother university the name of the town was
changed to Cambridge.

[Illustration: Founding of Harvard College]

It has been said that the assembly which decreed the establishment
of Harvard College was "the first body in which the people, by their
representatives, ever gave their own money to found a place of
education." [8] The act was a memorable one if we have regard to all the
circumstances of the year in which it was done. On every side danger was
in the air. Threatened at once with an Indian war, with the enmity of
the home government, and with grave dissensions among themselves, the
year 1636 was a trying one indeed for the little community of Puritans,
and their founding a college by public taxation just at this time is a
striking illustration of their unalterable purpose to realize, in this
new home, their ideal of an educated Christian society. [Sidenote:
Threefold danger in the year 1636]

That the government of Charles I. should view with a hostile eye the
growth of a Puritan state in New England is not at all surprising. (1.
From the king, who prepares to attack the infant colony but is fueled by
dissensions at home.) The only fit ground for wonder would seem to be
that Charles should have been willing at the outset to