"Att the fall of the yeare 1684 there came a longbodyed bb cow with this eare marke. She was very mild, and being a stranger, after publication, none owning her, James Harrison, att the request of Luke Brindley, the Ranger, wintered her, and upon the twenty-third of the 7th Mo., 1685, the cow was slaughtered and divided, two-thirds to the Governor, and one-third to the Ranger after James Harrison had 60 lbs. of her beef for the wintering of her."

So thee sees we have plenty of meat. We have 200 shad that were caught last spring and salted. Some of them are very big. The boys were out hunting yesterday and brought in two wild turkeys. We'll have one for dinner on Sixth-day, which is Monthly Meeting, and the other on First-day.

Mamma has school for me every day. She is the teacher and I am the scholars. I am head of my class. Papa says if I keep on doing that well he will send me to England to school when I get big. Then I'll see thee, grandma, and the dear old place I love so well. There is no more room on the paper so I must stop.

With lots of kisses and two pats for dear Old Rover, I remain thy affectionate granddaughter,

SALLY BRINDLEY.1

Wages were higher in the colonies than in England.2 At the end of the seventeenth century farm hands in New England were paid half a crown a day; if they were hired by the year they were paid from

1 Sharpless: A Quaker Experiment in Government, pp. 84-86.

2 For a detailed and extremely valuable compilation of wages and commodity prices from 1630 to 1789, see Weeden: Economic and Social History of New England, vol. 11, Appendix A.

£14 to £20 a year in corn, cattle, and fish; and even at that day it was noted that clothing cost more in the colonies than in England.' The usual wages of skilled laborers in Massachusetts, Adams says, were from sixty-five cents to a dollar a day; those of ordinary, unskilled laborers two shillings or thirty-three cents; and, fluctuations of currency apart, these wages seem to have generally ruled until the end of the eighteenth century.2 In England, in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, cooks and dairy-maids were paid £2 10s. a year; mowers of corn and grass, 1s. 2d. a day without meat and drink, and only 6d. with food; male haymakers, 10d. a day without food, and 5d with; female haymakers, 6d.; rough masons, carpenters, and plowmen, bricklayers, and tilers, 1s. 6d. from Lady Day to Michaelmas, and 1s. from Michaelmas to Lady Day. If they were fed, they had only 8d. a day all the year round. Gardeners and thatchers were paid at the same rate. Tailors earned 6d. a day with food, 10d. without; spinners earned only 4d. daily without food. This schedule of wages lasted into the reign of George I.3

In 1703, in Braintree, in Massachusetts, lived John Marshall, mason, carpenter, painter, non-commissioned officer in the militia, and pious Puritan; and

1 Josselyn: An Account of Two Voyages to New England, pp. 207-09. 2 Adams: Three Episodes of Massachusetts History, vol. 11, p. 687.

* Bryant and Gay: A Popular History of the United States, vol. 1, p. 127. Cf. Rogers: A History of Agriculture and Prices in England, vol. vii, part II, p. 610, et seq.

being a Puritan he kept a diary, for the Puritan took as naturally to making entries in a journal as he did to searching his Bible for texts. Marshall records under date of December, 1703, "that this winter provision hath been more plenty and cheap than is frequently known; beef for six farthings per pound, pork at twopence the most, the best two and a half pence, Indian [meal] two shillings per bushel, mault barlay at two shillings and sixpence." The eighteenth century was not a particularly humane age, and in England, so long as the great mass of labor was given just enough to keep body and soul comparatively in touch, society was satisfied that it had done all that was required; in America there was neither more nor less humanity. But in America, while the struggle for existence was in one respect more severe, in another it pressed with less severity; America has always been the land of opportunity, and the opportunity existed in the eighteenth century just as it does in the twentieth for those who recognize it. From the first coming of the English there was always an intense demand for labor, its scarcity had much to do in bridging the gulf between classes, the shortage making labor more independent than in Europe. "The fewness and dearness of servants," Lowell says, "made it necessary to call in temporary assistance for extraordinary occasions, and hence arose the common use of the word 'help.' As the great majority kept no

1 Proceedings Massachusetts Historical Society, vol. 1, second series, 1884.

servants at all, and yet were liable to need them for work to which the family did not suffice, as, for instance, in harvest, the use of the word was naturally extended to all kinds of service. That it did not have its origin in any false shame at the condition itself, induced by democratic habits, is plain from the fact that it came into use while the word 'servant' had a much wider application than now, and certainly implied no social stigma. Downing and Hooke, each at different times, one of them so late as 1667, wished to place a son as 'servant' with one of the Winthrops. Roger Williams writes of his daughter, that 'she desires to spend some time in service, and liked much Mrs. Brenton, who wanted. ""1

The man dissatisfied with his condition could easily find employment elsewhere; he need not work as a farm laborer, but could take up a farm of his own. The colonial legislatures attempted to transplant the social regulations of England, and keep the laborer to a fixed place of residence, but what was possible in England was impossible in the colonies. Here it is curious to observe how national characteristics originate and are developed by accidental circumstances. Necessity, opportunity, the conditions under which society was then organized, gave the colonial a migratory instinct, and made him seek out a place that seemed to offer an opportunity to retrieve failure. While the inherited 1 Lowell: Among My Books, vol. 1, p. 263.

tradition of the English peasantry was an almost limpet-like attachment to the soil and the place of his birth, the Englishman in America was early filled with a spirit of unrest which displayed itself in an adventurous desire to look over the rim. These are qualities that have become part of the fibre of the American, to whom distance means nothing and home is merely a convenient designation.1

1 Writing in 1796 from York, Pennsylvania, Weld notes that the Germans settle down and rarely rove about; "the American, on the contrary, is of a roving disposition, and wholly regardless of the ties of consanguinity; he takes his wife with him, goes to a distant part of the country, and buries himself in the woods, hundreds of miles distant from the rest of the family, never perhaps to see them again. . . . Restless and discontented with what they possess, they are forever changing. It is scarcely possible in any part of the continent to find a man, amongst the middling and lower classes of Americans, who has not changed his farm and his residence many different times." - Travels through the States of North America, pp. 99–100.