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In addition to regular heads, please catalogue under
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OLD PLYMOUTH ROAD.
Ninth Milestone.

THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE.

AN ADDRESS

IN COMMEMORATION OF

Wc^z One f untireDtl^ anniijerjsarr

INCORPORATION OF QUINCY, MASS.

Delivered July 4, 1892.

BY
CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS.

CAMBRIDGE:
JOHN WILSON AND SON.
BIntijcrsttg ^PtJss.
1892.

ADDRESS.

O OME months ago I had occasion to discuss certain details
of the celebration we are now engaged in with a greatly
valued friend of mine, bearing a name inscribed on many pages
of the records of Old Braintree, and who, in his own person, is
one of the few remaining specimens of the antique stock, —
the town-meeting stand-bys of former Quincy. In the course
of our discussion I referred to an address as one mode of com
memoration, telling him frankly that in my judgment the day
of such addresses was over, — that we had, in fact, of late been
deluged with them, especially since what may well enough be
described as the epoch of revolutionary centennials came in.
The not unnatural result had followed; and, as we all know
from our own experience, we now turn with a sense of weari
ness, if not, indeed, of surfeit, from that page of a daily paper
the columns of which are headed with an announcement that yet
one more commemoration has been observed in the custom
ary way. These historical orations and addresses had, as I then
went on to argue, at one time served their purpose, and it was
a useful purpose ; for in them is recorded much of historical
worth which otherwise might not have been preserved : but
this was before the days of town histories and historical socie
ties ; and now the oration or address had become the medium
by means of which a quantity of rhetoric or sentiment of small
present, and, so far as my observation went, of no future, value
was forced on the jaded eye and ear of an inattentive public.
Forgotten as soon as uttered, even the future antiquarian is
not likely to disturb the dust which accumulates upon those

6 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE.
yellowing pages. As I then told my friend, almost every period
seems to have some favorite mode of expression: — the last
century was in Massachusetts the era of sermons and pulpit
discourses, and it industriously stored up a vast literature of
that description, the present dreariness of which is inexpres
sible : ours has been the century of orations and secular ad
dresses, — -the Ciceronian period of America; and so, during
it, rhetoric and eloquence, much too often of the tinsel, aca
demic sort, have been made to serve the purpose which logic
and theological fervor served before. And, finally, I expressed
the belief that the student of the twentieth century would hold
this form of expression of our time in no greater value than we
hold the sermons and occasional discourses of the fathers. But
we too will have seen ourselves in print !
As I argued thus with the friend to whom I have referred,
he refused to accept my conclusions, replying that in his judg
ment it was inexpedient on occasions like the present to dis
pense with the time-honored feature of an address. He not
inaptly compared it to the planting of a milestone, which
marked for all future time some point which a community had
reached in its endless journey. Here we pause for a moment ;
and, resting from the march, we cast a glance backward over
the road by which we have come, as well as forward over that
we are yet to traverse. At such a time, he went on, we are, or
ought to be, a world unto ourselves : why, then, trouble our
minds about other people or about posterity, wondering whether
other people are looking at us, or whether posterity will bear
us in memory.'' — it is enough that we have got thus far in our
progress, and, throwing off our loads for this day, we pile up
the stones which in the future shall serve as a memorial that
here we rested as we passed the hundredth milepost of Quincy.
Then he referred to other days, reminding me of milestones
planted in bygone times by the hands of those who are dead ;
and as he enumerated these, I had to admit force in what he
said. First was the milestone, now more than a century and
a half old, which we owe to the Rev. John Hancock, then
pastor of the North Precinct Church of Braintree, — a mile
stone which has come down to us in the form of two sermons

THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 7
delivered by him to his people, then gathered on Sunday,
the 26th of September, 1739 (N. S.), within the walls of the
old meeting-house which stood hard by this spot. After the
delivery of which discourses the ancient records say that, " be
ing the Lord's day, the First Church of Braintree, both males
and females, solemnly renewed the covenant of their fathers
immediately before the participation of the Lord's Supper."
The century of church life was complete, and a fitting memo
rial of it provided, — a memorial which, though little noticed
by the great outer world, some of us here would be sorry not
to have.
Another century passed away, and on the same occasion,
on the same date in 1839, though not from the same pulpit,
William Parsons Lunt in the stone temple, as it is called,
which eleven years before had succeeded on the training-field
the ancient meeting-house in which John Hancock delivered
his centennial address, — in this stone temple, this very edifice,
Dr. Lunt set up another of my friend's milestones, which re
mains to-day a valued and lasting memorial of the preacher's
eloquence and scholarship. Few now remember him, but
William Parsons Lunt was in his day a great pulpit orator, —
and he was great because he was natural. The second mile
stone is his monument.
Fifty years more elapsed, and only the other day, in Septem
ber, 1889, the Rev. Daniel Munro Wilson, now here with us,
placed a third stone, marking the end of another half century
of ecclesiastical life, — a memorial worthy of the others, and
one the value and significance of which will grow with revolv
ing years.
Influenced, I will freely admit, by these arguments and illus
trations of my friend, I find myself here to-day, and here for a
purpose, — to help plant another milestone. " All things come
to him who waits ; " and so, amid present indifference, my ap
peal is to the twentieth century, or even later: — for why may
it not be that in the year 2042, when the city of Quincy cele
brates its two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, — and it is just
as certain that the city of Quincy, either by itself or as part of
some larger municipality, will be here then as it is that not one

O THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE.
of US will be here, — why may it not well be that, in 2042, when
our very gravestones are crumbling, those then dwelling here
about may rest for a moment as they come to the quarter-
millennial milestone, and in doing so may hunt up the record
of to-day, just as we hunt up the sermons of John Hancock,
dwelling for a moment with curiosity and even interest on
that memorial of a remote past, — clasping hands across the
centuries. It is not many spoken words that can hope for even
a single listener a century and a half after they drop from the
speaker's mouth ; yet not a day passes but some one looks with
interest on the single ancient milestone of 1720 which still
within Quincy limits marks the old Plymouth road.' Rude,
rough and ill-proportioned, it has cut upon it, besides the
distance from Boston and the date, the initials J. N., — stand
ing, I am told, for " Capt. Lieut." Joseph Neal, as he is desig
nated on his gravestone in the burying-ground opposite. One
of the twenty-one children of Henry Neal, — for in those days
there were families patriarchal, — Joseph Neal, was a select
man of Braintree from 1698 to 1715, and died in 1737, leaving
his mark inscribed on that stone by the old Plymouth road,
which had already stood there more than half a century when
the minute-men tramped by in the April days which fol
lowed Concord fight.' So it is to-day Joseph Neal's stone.
In like manner, on the century ecclesiastical milestone of
the town, the name of John Hancock is inscribed ; while the
bi-centennial bears that of William Parsons Lunt, and the
quarter millennial that of Daniel Munro Wilson. And now
we plant this centennial civic milestone of to-day.
Still, in turning over the printed memorials of the past, we
cannot help thinking of how much greater interest and value
they would be to us had those called upon to prepare them been
less ambitious and abstruse, — had they only felt moved to talk
to us instead of to their congregations, and so to place on rec
ord something which, though commonplace and matter-of-fact
enough then, would be quaint and curious now. For instance,
what a stroke of inspiration would it have been if the Rev. John
Hancock, when in 1739 he preached those two discourses to
1 See Appendix A, p. 41.

THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 9
his people in the ancient wooden meeting-house of 1732, then
almost new, — what a stroke of inspiration would it have been
if, in a series of notes or in some preliminary pages, he had
described for our benefit it and the people then gathered in it, —
the dress they wore and the forms of worship they followed ;
the houses in which they dwelt, the streets in which they
walked, the vocations they pursued ; — had he given us, in a
word, a pictorial census of the Quincy of 1739! It was all so
very familiar to him and to his hearers that the thought doubt
less never entered his mind ; but now, could this town as it
stood here a century and a half ago be for an instant recalled
to life, it would seem as strange and unreal to us as any foreign
land, — the very language and accent in use, though intelligible
enough, would strike oddly on the ear ; — only the bay, the
islands in it, and the everlasting hills would be the same. As
an illustration, take this description of the meeting-house in
which John Hancock preached, as it was first seen by one who
came to Quincy a young bride nearly a century ago, but still
,more than fifty years after the father of the great signer of the
Declaration had been followed to the graveyard opposite : —
"There were [in Quincy at that time] only two churches, both
ancient wooden edifices, — the Episcopal and the Congregational.
The pews in the centre of the latter, having been made out of long,
open seats by successive votes of the town, were of different sizes, and
had no regularity of arrangement, and several were entered by narrow
passages, winding between those in their neighborhood. The seats,
being provided with hinges, were raised when the congregation stood
during the prayer, and, at its conclusion, thrown down with a mo
mentum which, on her first attendance, alarmed Mrs. Quincy, who
feared the church was falling. The deacons were ranged under the
pulpit, and beside its door the sexton was seated ; while, from an ap
erture aloft in the wall, the bell-ringer looked in from the tower to
mark the arrival of the clergyman. The voices of the choir in the
front gallery were assisted by a discordant assemblage of stringed
and wind instruments. In 1806, when the increased population of
the town required a larger edifice, the meeting-house was divided
into two parts ; the pulpit, and the pews in its vicinity, were moved
to a convenient distance, and a new piece was inserted between the
fragments."

10 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE.
Not impossibly we might learn something of value for to
day's occasion from this criticism which I have ventured on
what has been left us by those gone before. The present, in
its every-day surroundings, seems matter-of-fact and uninter
esting enough to us; none the less, the time will assuredly
come when this commonplace present of ours will be very
much otherwise to those who here succeed us. The remote
is always strange. I, if no one else, therefore, may be per
mitted to express a hope that to-day's address will constitute
a small part only of our centennial memorial. That memorial,
on the contrary, should be designed to do what the Hancock
and Lunt memorials fail to do, — it should present us to the
future as we are. But this rests with others; it is that por
tion of commemorative work which deals more especially with
externals, physical conditions, — a matter of statistics, plans
and portraiture ; and however well and thoroughly it may be
done, there is still a field, and a not unimportant field, which
it cannot cover : and that field is my province.
As municipal bodies go in America, — weighed, that is, in
the census scales, and classified according to the number of
its houses and inhabitants, the aggregate of its wealth, and
the variety and value of its industrial products, — weighed in
these census scales, no great degree of prominence can be
claimed for Quincy. In point of population she stands twenty-
fourth only among the twenty-eight cities of Massachusetts ;
while in the nation as a whole, judged by the same standard,
she is merely one out of ninety-two cities of the fifth class,'
holding the one hundred and ninety-seventh place in the length
ening roll of American municipalities. Neither is Quincy the
seat of any great institution of learning or special industry, —
unless, indeed, it may still claim pre-eminence for its granite ;
but, none the less, Quincy has had its history, nor has that
history been devoid of individuality or interest. Unlike many
larger communities, the record of Quincy is by no means ex
hausted in the pages of the census, for through more than two
1 Under the system of division pursued in the preparation of the Eleventli
United States Census, cities having a population of over 15,000 and less than
25,000 are included in the fifth class.

THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. I I
hundred and fifty years those dwelling in .the territory now
known by that name have had to face their problems, and
have done so as best they could. Here in America it may
be questioned whether a state of Chinese immobility is ever
reached ; certainly it has never been reached in Quincy.
Sometimes, indeed, the change and consequent re-adjust
ment involved in the solution of these problems may have
been slow, — so slow that those then living and affected by
them may not have been conscious that they were going on ;
but all the same they were going on, and if the story of them
when told is not found instructive as well as interesting, the
fault, we may rest assured, is not in the subject, but in him who
treats it. No particular interest ever, so far as the average
man can see, attached to the English Selborne, nor was there
anything about the place or its conditions to attract especial
notice ; but a century and more ago Gilbert White lived and
saw and wrote at Selborne, and Selborne has since been classic
ground. It is the study and statement of these processes of
change and re-adjustment ever going on, now forward and
then backward, action and reaction, conditions now out of
balance, and then again in equilibrium, — it is the study and
statement of this which makes history ; and all this can be
quite as well studied on the small theatre as on the large. It
is only a matter of size, — a question of bigger or smaller ;
and, as Gilbert White proved, here too the painter, and not
the dimensions of the canvas, makes the picture.
Were the story of Quincy told by some historical Gilbert
White, it would be transmuted to a hand-mirror, in which
could be seen reflected to the life every important phase
through which New England and even American development
has passed from 1622 to the present time. Unfortunately Gil
bert Whites are not forthcoming in response to every civic de
mand, and of such as are forthcoming few indeed "inherit nor
the pride nor ample pinion that the Theban eagle bear ; " and
so the story invariably has to be told in the conventional way.
When thus approached, our local Quincy record divides itself
into three distinctive periods, the study of each of which, if
entered upon in the true spirit, I, at least, find full of interest;

12 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE.
and each period had its own peculiar problems to deal with.
These periods were, first, the germinal; next, the stationary ;
and last, the progressive, — and they naturally followed each
other in the order named. The first, or germinal, period, be
gan in 1625, when Thomas Morton established himself at
Mount Wollaston, planting his Maypole there two years later ;
and it ended in 1642, when this territory was given the name
of Braintree and organized as a civil community. The sec
ond, or stationary period, beginning in 1640, may be said to
have lasted one hundred and ninety years, — coming to an
end in 1830, about the time the ancient meeting-house of the
Rev. John Hancock made room for the edifice in which we are
now gathered. In 1830 began the third period, that of rapid
progress and consequent readjustment, — the period in which
we have lived, and that of which some of the as yet unsolved
problems will to-day engage our attention.
Of these three periods of town history the first, or germinal,
is by far the most interesting, for the thread of its earliest
story interweaves itself with great events involving the fate of
dynasties and empires, — famous names now and again flash
ing across the local record ; while at another time, a little
later on, infant Braintree, not yet known as such, was the
centre, the very hotbed, of historical episodes which left in
effaceable marks on the annals of Massachusetts. But this ger
minal period pertains rather to Old Braintree than to Quincy,
to the seventeenth century rather than to that the close of
which we commemorate. Indeed, for this occasion the Brain
tree germinal period is almost as prehistoric as that time
before the ice age, when, geologists tell us, the bed-rocks
underlying our town towered up two hundred feet higher than
now, and were fifty miles from the seaboard.'
But if the Braintree germinal period is for the purposes of
to-day thus remote, it is otherwise with both the subsequent
periods, — that which I have called the stationary, and that of
rapid progress ; both of which, though less dramatic than the
first, have an interest of their own.
While, as I have already said. New England communities
1 See Appendix B, p. 44.

THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 13
never reach a condition of immobility such as is understood
to be characteristic of China, and while all change, be it
rapid or slow, involves, soon or late, a process of readjust
ment of conditions to environment, it is undeniable that the
process of change and the consequent readjustment went on
slowly and at the moment imperceptibly in the town life of
the stationary period of New England history. Referring to
that provincial life in one of his great orations, Edmund
Burke described it, with that inimitable happiness of phrase
possessed by him and by Shakespeare alone among English
writers, as the existence of a people " still, as it were, in the
gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone ; " and this it
exactly was while five generations followed each other slowly
across the little stage, the atmosphere of which was at once
theological and icy. Change was neither expected nor de
sired. A simple, laborious, unaggressive race, those com
posing it were born, lived and died ; and concerning them
there is little more to record. During that long period the
world, both of Europe and America, was more or less con
vulsed ; revolutions took place in England, in Germany and
in France, dynasties rose and fell, the house of Brunswick
succeeded that of Stuart, and Europe waged war after war, in
the course of which Canada passed under English rule, and
the American colonies became independent; but, through all
the turmoil, the local towns of Massachusetts — Braintree and
Quincy among the number — pursued the even tenor of their
way. The changes going on without, of which the noise filled
the world, were all political changes, and the readjustments
they necessitated were likewise merely political ; but in the
New England towns no new social forces were at work, nor was
the existing equilibrium, social, religious, economical or political,
seriously disturbed. Thus in 1830 the inhabitants of Quincy
cultivated the same fields their fathers had cultivated in 1650,
and used in so doing much the same implements ; they navi
gated the same waters with similar vessels. Each generation
in the course of an eventless, patient, laborious life accumu
lated something, leaving to the next generation more fields
under cultivation, better dwellings and farm buildings, and
3

14 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE.
some additional comforts and appliances of life ; but domestic
and social usages, and, indeed, all the practical machinery of
existence, remained much the same. While the outer world
influenced but little the village community, the village commu
nity in no way affected the outer world. It has a strange
sound now, but it is none the less true that prior to 1830 —
only sixty years ago — steam was an unknown factor in the
life and industry of Quincy, and what we term machinery was
unknown. As it was in 1640, so it remained a hundred and
ninety years after ; and within the memory of men hardly yet
regarded as old, the horse, the ox, the wind and the stream
were the only forces auxiliary to man. In 1826 the granite
railway was constructed here in Quincy, and four years later
the first railroad was incorporated in Massachusetts ; but,
incredible as it now seems, more than one hundred and sixty
years elapsed after Braintree was incorporated as a town, be
fore even a baggage wagon, adapted also to the carriage of
persons, was run over the road between Boston and Quincy, —
so trifling was the intercourse and traffic between the two
places, though but seven miles apart. Even then, when in
1804 the experiment of such a conveyance was tried, it was
found through twenty years to meet every existing need ; and
not until 1823 did the stage-coach period begin. But the
wine had now begun to ferment, and three years later the
railway came : then, slowly at first, but more and more rapidly
later on, the era of change set in ; and by degrees the customs
and institutions which English and French revolutions, wars
of independence and conquests of Canada had affected little
if at all, steam and electricity radically altered.
With the change came the necessity of readjustment. The
body politic had to adapt its political system to the new
environments, and the alterations to be made in the political
system, if satisfactory results were to be brought about, had
to be just as far-reaching as had been the change in the
social, material and industrial conditions; for they all move
together. It is with the problems involved in these changes,
and the consequent readjustment and adaptation, that we
have found ourselves confronted during the closing years

THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 15
of our first century of independent civic life. During its
second century those problems will have to be solved, and
it is to them and their solution I now propose to address
myself. But first it is necessary to state what those problems are,
or rather what that problem is ; for, when all is said and done,
the problem is single, and as easy to state as it is difficult to
solve. Coming, then, directly to it and using few words, the
system — the time-honored system — of local municipal gov
ernment under which our fathers lived and the country pros
pered and grew has, in the presence of the changes of the last
fifty years, completely broken down and been in large degree
abandoned. In Boston, first among the communities of Mas
sachusetts, they abandoned it seventy years ago, just as we
here in Quincy, following many precedents more recently
established, abandoned it four years ago ; we abandoned it as
others abandoned it, not because we wanted to abandon it,
but because we had to abandon it ; and we had to abandon it
simply because change necessitated readjustment. Thus our
problem is not ours only ; on the contrary, it is that common
problem of municipal government under republican institu
tions which for many years has caused, and for more years
yet is likely to cause, thoughtful and observant Americans to
be perplexed in the extreme.
Under circumstances like these there is no small advantage
gained by looking at the situation through the eyes of another,
especially if that other chances to be a cool, reflecting outside
observer. Those lost and wandering in the woods cannot see
for trees, and proximity destroys the sense of proportion.
The last and, taken altogether, the most friendly and appre
ciative of all recent foreign observers of things American, —
that one the circulation of whose work has far exceeded any
other of the same kind, — speaking of the growth of American
cities, refers to it as "among the most significant and least
fortunate changes " in the character of our population, and as
a matter of "high concern to America, . . . because it is ad
mittedly the weak point of the country ; " then, truthfully say
ing that "no political subject has been so copiously discussed

1 6 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE.
of late years in America by able and experienced publicists,"
he adds these comments of his own : —
" There is no denying that the government of cities is the one
conspicuous failure of the United States. The deficiencies of the
National government tell but little for evil on the welfare of the
people. The faults of the State governments are insignificant com
pared with the extravagance, corruption, and mismanagement which
mark the administrations of most of the great cities. For these
evils are not confined to one or two cities. The commonest mis
take of Europeans who talk about America is to assume that the
political vices of New York are found everywhere. The next most
common is to suppose that they are found nowhere else. In New
York they have revealed themselves on the largest scale. They are
'gross as a mountain, monstrous, palpable.' But there is not a city
with a population exceeding two hundred thousand where the poison
germs have not sprung into a vigorous life ; and in some of the
smaller ones, down to seventy thousand, it needs no microscope to
note the results of their growth. Even in cities of the third rank
similar phenomena may occasionally be discerned, though there, as
some one has said, the jet black of New York or San Francisco dies
away into a harmless gray. . . .
" For in great cities we find an ignorant multitude, largely composed
of recent immigrants, untrained in self-government ; we find a great
proportion of the voters paying no direct taxes, and therefore feeling
no interest in moderate taxation and economical administradon ;
we find able citizens absorbed in their private businesses, cultivated
citizens unusually sensitive to the vulgarities of practical politics,
and both sets therefore specially unwilling to sacrifice their time and
tastes and comfort in the struggle with sordid wire-pullers and noisy
demagogues. In great cities the forces that attack and pervert
democratic government are exceptionally numerous, the defensive
forces that protect it exceptionally ill-placed for resistance. Satan
has turned his heaviest batteries on the weakest part of the
ramparts. "... What Dante said of his own city may be said of the cities
of America : they are like the sick man who cannot find rest
upon his bed, but seeks to ease his pain by turning from side to
side." ' 1 Bryce, TAe American Commonwealth, chaps. 1. — lii.

THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 1 7
As we well know, the picture is not overdrawn, and we must
reconcile ourselves as best we may to the fact that the dis
turbance — the incessant tossing of "the sick man who cannot
find rest on his bed" — will continue until the readjustment is
effected. The difficulty is radical, deep-seated, striking down
into the vitals of our political life. One hundred years ago,
when Quincy came into independent civic existence as a town
of nine hundred inhabitants, there were in all America but
twelve cities, and the largest of them had but forty thousand
inhabitants ; there are now seventy-four cities with more
than that number. Quincy alone, a city of the fifth class, —
one of hundreds, — has to-day nearly half the population
New York had when Quincy became a town. In 1792 there
was no city government in Massachusetts. Boston, with
twenty thousand inhabitants, was governed by its board of
selectmen chosen in town meeting ; and it continued to be
so governed for yet thirty years more, and until the twenty
thousand had become forty thousand. To-day there are
twenty-eight cities in the Commonwealth, and nearly two-
thirds of its inhabitants live within city limits and under city
government. Thus the old town system is disappearing ; with
us here it has disappeared.
Students of the laws which guide the process of what is
known as evolution state as a fundamental principle that " the ^
greater the amount of progress already made, the more rapidly
must progress go on ; " though the average man is always, in
an unreflecting way, inclined to assume that the course of events
will stop where it is, and things for the future remain about
as they now are. But in this matter the student, and not
the average man, is right ; and moreover the swift and ever
accelerating process now going on from natural causes in the
matter of change from town to city government is further
artificially stimulated by that protective system which has be
come such a fixed and leading feature in the economical and
fiscal policy of the national government. Thus all things
in this country seem to combine to draw population away
from a state of rural and agricultural dififusion to one of
manufacturing and urban concentration.

1 8 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE.
Not many of us living here in Quincy realize how complete
this change has been in our own case, and how rapidly it has
gone on of late, — how little in any respect the Quincy com
munity of 1892 resembles that of 1792. I have already alluded
to that Quincy, — the wholly vanished Quincy of the earlier
time; but, since I did so, we have been peering forward on the
road we are yet to travel, trying to make out its direction and
character, whether broad and straight and level, or devious,
steep and narrow. I shall presently ask you to take another
and longer onward look ; but, before doing so, let us, pausing
yet at our centennial milestone, look back once more for an
instant. There are among us those, nor are they few in
number, who have recently joined the column, and so are
but imperfectly informed both of the way we have traversed,
and of what occurred as we journeyed along it. This looking
back, moreover, is not only necessary for the purposes of my
address, but it is the historical portion of it; and, as such, an
essential of the place and day.
This Quincy of ours you know, and to us it is a very com
monplace concern ; nor shall I weary you by describing it.
You do not need to be told of its inhabitants, nearly twice ten
thousand in number, with names English, Irish, Scotch, French,
Swedish, and of many other origins, those bearing which wor
ship in many churches, or not at all, while they earn their
bread in multifarious ways. It would be little better than
waste of time were I to repeat before you the figures of the
school census, and tell you how many scholars — with a con
siderable proportion of whom English is not even the mother
tongue — are taught in the numerous districts, or try to esti
mate the weight of the tonnage which daily grinds over the
fast-increasing mileage of our overburdened highways. In
one region, the Quincy of to-day is but the retiring-room, the
sleeping apartment, of the Boston counting-house; while in
another it is a mining camp ; and in yet a third a manufactur
ing community. There is hardly a farm left within the muni
cipal limits; while, except for purposes of pleasure or at our
lumber and coal yards, we have no more to do with the ocean
or navigation than if the seaboard still were, as it was ten

THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 1 9
thousand years ago, fifty miles away.' But why go on with the
idle enumeration of things familiar .' On the contrary, let me
go back at once to the Quincy of one hundred years ago ;
nor, nearly forty years later, in 1830, had it undergone any
material change.
The petition for the incorporation of the town, as spread on
the first pages of its earliest book of records, was signed by
one hundred and fifty persons, the bearers of fifty-nine several
names, every one of which was English in its origin ; or else
those bearing such few as were not originally English names
had been so long domiciled in New England that the foreign
names had become thoroughly Anglicized.^ The fifty-nine
names were thus indicative of one homogeneous stock ; those
bearing them spoke the same language, followed the same
traditions, had the same social customs,, pursued much the
same vocations, and worshipped according to one creed and
in a common meeting-house. So completely was this last the
case that one of the townsmen of that generation, referring to
a certain thing as being of most unusual occurrence, declared,
in a paper which has come down to us, that it was " as
rare an appearance as a Roman Catholic, — that is, as rare
as a comet or an earthquake."
As nearly as can be ascertained, the population of the new
town numbered nine hundred souls in all, divided into some
what less than two hundred families, whose accumulated
wealth may possibly have amounted in value to a half million
of dollars. Their property consisted almost exclusively of land
and the buildings thereon, with their contents ; for paper secu
rities in our sense of the term were then unknown, except in
the form of personal or town notes, or loans secured by bond
and mortgage. Taxation was almost nominal ; and during the
first ten years of Quincy town life the average annual levy for
what are now known as municipal purposes, that is, purposes
exclusive of the support of the church and pastor, which then
devolved on the town, — exclusive of this, the average annual
levy between 1792 and 1800 was but ^1,000, or about ;?i.oo
per year to each inhabitant. It is now over two hundred
^ See Appendix C, p. 47. ^ See Appendix D, p. 48.

20 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE.
times as much, while the average amount exacted annually
from each inhabitant has risen nearly thirteen fold since 1792,
and more than seven fold since 1840: it was $1.00 when
the century began, and $1.72 when the century was half
over; it is $12.57 now that the century is closed. In 1792
the appropriation for the support of the town schools — or
rather the town school, for there was but one — amounted
to $250; and in 1829 it amounted to but ;^i,563, of which
$60 was for fuel and 5S-00 for incidentals, — these latter being
" ink and brooms." The amount expended for the educa
tion of each child in the public schools was then IS3.00 per
annum; it is now $16. It was the same with the highways.
There are at this time in Quincy some fifty miles of public
streets, much of which is subjected to a traflfic in the car
riage of granite which no pavement known to the engineer or
road-builder is able long to bear ; and in 1 890 over $40,000
was spent in the maintenance of these streets. In 1792 the
old original Plymouth road, — a section of the great " Coast
Road" of 1639, — with its few arterial branches, alone existed;
and at the town meeting of that year a vote was passed "that
a sum of money be raised for the purpose of repairing the
Blue Hill road," as the highway from Boston to Bristol county
was called ; " and it was further voted that three pounds," or
$10, "be raised for repairing the same." It was then, the
record further tells us, voted that " a new pall be purchased by
the selectmen ; " for the town in those days made decent pro
vision for the sepulture of the dead as well as for the spiritual
welfare of the living. Nearly thirty years later, in 1820, a com
mittee appointed to investigate the subject reported that the
room in which the one town school was kept was so crowded
that the scholars, two hundred and four in number, "were ob
liged to wait one for the other for seats, notwithstanding the
master gave up his desk and used every other means in his
power to accommodate them ; " and the committee then went
on to submit a plan for certain alterations, at an estimated cost
of $200, by which two hundred and fifty scholars were to be
brought together in one room and under one master, " with an
assistant when necessary." Ten years later, in 1830, the sum

THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 21
of $600 was deemed an adequate provision for a year's main
tenance of the highways.
But instead of going on with these details, I will come at
once to what the records show was the golden period of Quincy
town government, more especially as so doing affords oppor
tunity for a tribute to one now wellnigh forgotten, but who,
during that golden period, was the great administrator of
Quincy town affairs. I am one of the not large and fast-
decreasing number of Quincy people who still remember
Thomas Greenleaf, — for he died nearly forty years ago; and
I remember him only as an aged man, with white hair, a
deeply wrinkled face and anxious, troubled eyes, driving to
and fro through the village street, from his home to the post-
office or to church, in a queer old-fashioned vehicle drawn by
a horse which seemed as much advanced in years as its mas
ter, and hardly less retired from active life. Thomas Greenleaf
was then the shadow of his former self ; but in his day and
generation he was a power in Quincy.
Between 1800 and 1835 ^^^ people of the town were well to
do, but they had a traditional horror of waste, and scrutinized
their tax-bills closely. While the scale of town expenses was
so limited that no item escaped notice, and the sum of five dol
lars spent for an unaccustomed purpose would not improbably
lead to a town meeting discussion, anything like corruption in
public office was of course impossible ; it would have been de
tected at once. Though the conditions were thus most favor
able to good administration of affairs, prior to 1810 the town
business had been done in a loose, unsystematic way. The
annual appropriations were made by vtva voce vote ; the treas
urer received the money which the constable collected; and
the selectmen drew it out and paid it over to the minister, the
schoolmaster, and those charged with the care of the town's
poor. No reports or estimates were made, no papers placed
on file; everything was done on a general understanding. A
cruder, less organized system would be difficult to imagine ;
and little could be said in its favor, except that it was natural,
and, like most natural things, it worked well under the circum
stances. As the town increased, some individual was needed
4

22 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE.
to organize such a degree of system as the new conditions de
manded, — there was a distinct call for a man of administrative
capacity ; and that man appeared in Mr. Greenleaf, — the typi
cal, natural leader and administrator of a Massachusetts town ;
one whose field was small, but who was none the less a states
man in his way, and a statesman of a school which the
community cannot do without. For in this case the rule is
reversed, — it is the less which includes the larger ; and, where
every minor division of a community habitually produces a
body of selectmen certain of whom are capable of organizing
and administering the affairs of a town, the community as a
whole can be depended upon always through a process of
natural selection to evolve statesmen in an emergency. It
was so in the Revolution; — the town meeting was the nursery
of the Continental Congress, — the selectman developed into
the cabinet official.
Of this class was Thomas Greenleaf. Boston born, he was
graduated at Harvard in 1790 ; and coming to Quincy to live
in 1803, he remained there until his death in 1854. He
speedily began to take an active interest in town affairs, and
his subsequent life showed how useful in a local way a man of
character, fair parts, and good business capacity can always be.
He belonged to the colonial gentry ; and, a man of property,
he was, it almost goes without the saying, a strong Federalist.
In 1808, and for thirteen consecutive years thereafter, he was
chosen to represent the town in the General Court, and during
those years he became the leading man in Quincy ; and so
continued until after 1835. -^s such he organized the town's
business, and he did it admirably. The change began about
1 8 12, when the cost of the town poor had grown to be a scan
dal. Mr. Greenleaf took the matter in hand, and caused an
almshouse to be built. He was chairman of the building com
mittee. The sum of $2,000 was appropriated for the purpose,
— for the scale then was small, — and when the building was
completed, Mr. Greenleaf reported, with a pride which he did
not attempt to conceal, that though no allowance had been
made for omissions in the estimates, and much extra work had
been done, — amounting to twenty per cent, — yet, notwith-

THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 23
standing this, the new almshouse was finished, and every bill
paid, with $84.48 of the appropriation unexpended. Under his
close business management the cost of maintaining the poor
was then reduced by more than one half; and his reports on
the subject, spread in full on the records, are as interesting
to-day in presence of that still unsolved problem of pauperism
as they were when written, more than seventy years ago.
Having reduced the care of the poor to a system, Mr. Green
leaf turned his attention to other matters. Insensibly, but
steadily, the method of conducting public business in all its
branches was brought into strict order. In March the annual
town-meeting was held, and over it Mr. Greenleaf presided as
moderator; the full list of town officers was chosen, and the
various articles in the warrant referred to special committees.
The meeting then adjourned. In April another meeting was
held, and the committees on the almshouse, the schools, the
town lands, and the town finances presented their reports,
which were in writing, and entered into every detail. Another
adjournment was then had, and in May the appropriations were
voted. Everything was thus made public and of record ; and
everything was open to criticism and debate. As a system of
local government, under the conditions then existing, it did not
admit of improvement.
It is needless to say that under the Greenleaf regime Quincy
prospered greatly. A debt of some $2,000 was incurred on
account of the War of 1812 and for building the almshouse in
1 8 14, but it was speedily paid off out of the surplus which a
better management saved from the regular annual appropria
tions for the care of the poor. In 18 16 the town-hall and
schoolhouse was burned down, — for town-hall and schoolhouse
still were one. The amount appropriated for a new building
to serve both purposes was $2,400. Mr. Greenleaf again was
chairman of the bui4ding committee ; and once more he in due
time, with overflowing pride, reported the work done, all the
bills paid, whether included in the original estimate or found
to be necessary as building went on, with an unexpended
balance of $362.61 remaining in the hands of the treasurer.
Though in doing this a new town debt had been incurred, good

24 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE.
financial management soon paid it off without increase of
taxation. What was this but the administration of a state in
miniature ? — and, when all is said and done, how considerable,
do you suppose, in the measurement of the infinite, is the
difference between the successful management of the affairs of
a town and those of an empire ?
The digression may seem long, but not only does it cut on
our milestone a name which rightfully belongs on it, but in no
other way could I give so clear an idea of what Massachusetts
town-government was at its best period and in its purest form.
Under proper conditions no better government was ever de
vised by human ingenuity; — I should almost be willing to go
further, and say no other form of government was ever devised
equally good. But town government also has its limitations ;
and Quincy, like Boston before, in due time found them out.
The Greenleaf regime ended nearly sixty years ago, and
during those sixty years the differentiation of modern life has
taken place. It is one thing to manage the affairs of a small
village community through the machinery of town-meetings ;
it is quite another to manage those of a place numbering a
population of a score of thousands. In 1830 the annual appro
priation of Quincy for necessary town expenses was $4,500.
It has been seen how this sum was voted by a small body of
men, all knowing each other well, having a community of in
terest, and acting under a usage which had the force of law.
Forty-five years later, in 1876, the annual appropriation was
$116,000, and the articles in the warrant had swollen from half
a dozen in number to nearly forty. The character of the town-
meeting also had changed. In place of the few score farmers
or tillers of the soil, following the accustomed lead of a man
like Thomas Greenleaf in this century, or John Quincy in the
last, and asserting themselves only when they thought their
traditions or equality were ignored, — in place of this small,
easily-managed body, there met in the Quincy town-meeting
of the later period a heterogeneous mass of men numbering
hundreds, jealous, unacquainted, and often in part bent on
carrying out some secret arrangement in which private interest
over-rode all sense of public welfare.

THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 25
In Other words, — and in this respect our experience in
Quincy has been merely a repetition of the experience of
those dwelling in many other places, — government through
town-meeting must always remain a primitive form of govern
ment, and one adapted only to the needs of a comparatively
simple community, homogeneous, and neither too numerous
nor with wealth very unequally distributed. Its chief excel
lence lies in the fact that it is the most perfect government of
the people by the people which has ever been devised ; and its
simplicity is its most striking characteristic. Though admitting
of very considerable development, and far more elastic and
adaptable to circumstances under skilful business handling
than would naturally have been supposed, town-meeting govern
ment does not, any more than other forms of government, ad
mit of infinite development, nor is its elasticity without limit.
The original requirements of Quincy, like other Massachusetts
villages, were few and comparatively simple ; but during the
last sixty years the few requirements have multiplied, the
simple has become complex, the homogeneous has become
heterogeneous. Church has indeed been separated from state;
but in place of the one function of which the town was thus
relieved, the modern municipality has found itself compelled
to assume endless other functions. The schools have been
multiplied ; and so have the branches of instruction pursued
in them, — until even the more rudimentary forms of education
have become the province of specialists. The highways, in
the case of Quincy, are crushed under a traffic which reduces
the firmest known pavement to powder. The care of the
sick, the poor and the insane has been magnified into a
science and reduced to a system. These, the ancient and
traditional functions of the town, have all, through the nat
ural process of development, passed, in the larger centres of
population, beyond the handling capacity of the ordinary offi
cial, and of necessity devolved upon a class of men specially
trained to deal with them. Meanwhile, other and new needs
have made themselves felt. The public peace has to be pro
vided for ; scientific provision must be made against fire ;
streets need to be lighted, questions of public health are to

26 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE.
be considered, the introduction of water necessitates drainage,
the old burying-ground develops into the modern cemetery,
the public school differentiates and is supplemented by the
public library, and the training-field and ancient common,
having passed away, are replaced by the park and the public
garden. The performance of the duties necessarily pertaining
to all these things, calling as they do for almost infinite special
knowledge and a complicated financial machinery, was imposed
little by little on the old town governments. It was as if an
old-fashioned country cart, well designed, honestly made of ex
cellent material, altogether good in its day and for what was
then needed of it, was by degrees called upon to do the work of
a modern railroad train. As a matter of course the cart must
break down. So government through town-meeting broke
down in Quincy in 1888, just as nearly seventy years before
it broke down in Boston.
Thus the problem presented itself to us, and its solution is
not a matter of choice or of pleasure, but of stern necessity :
nor do I think it would be stating the case in language of
undue strength to say that this problem of municipal govern
ment is the present skeleton in the closet of the American
political household. Nevertheless, in the situation, however
uncomfortable or disturbing it may be, there is one feature of
great encouragement. Our problem may be difficult, and its
solution yet remote; and few Americans who have thought
at all upon the, subject will deny that it is difficult, or that no
great degree of progress towards a solution has yet been
made : but at least in our case the way to a solution is open
and obvious, — no throttlc'Valve chokes it. For in this respect
the body politic bears a close resemblance to material things
in the domain of physics ; and men of science say that if an
amount of water enough to fill a tea-pot only, were confined
in a small space, with no outlet of escape, and were there sub
jected to a sufficient degree of heat, the weight of the universe
would not sufifice to hold it in. It would find or make a
vent ; and the commotion caused by it in so doing would be
in exact proportion to the resistance it was forced to overcome.
On this point, history is full of object-lessons, even though

THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 27
mankind is slow to see and understand them. The wars of
the religious Reformation were such an object-lesson. The
most absolute and far-reaching system of domination which
the ingenuity of man, working on custom, superstition and
fear, has yet devised, sought in the sixteenth century to hold
freedom of thought in strict restraint. The new force had
long lain inert, or expanded but slowly ; then by degrees its
presence began to be felt. Thereupon the repressive power
in turn exerted itself, with no thought of a vent, until at
last, through the lives of four wretched generations, it was
as if an earthquake were shaking the everlasting hills, and
toppling down every structure raised by man. It was the
same in the French Revolution of the last century ; it is
the same in Russia to-day. In other words, agitation, rest
lessness, disorder and the demand for change are in the
body politic merely outward indications of some process of
internal readjustment at the time going on, as a result of
which the existing order of things accommodates itself to
new conditions ; and the readjustment is sudden or gradual,
easy or violent, according to the nature of the new force
at work, and the repressive influence against which it has
to assert itself. Nature has a way of working peculiar to
itself : it is not apt to be in a hurry, but it is sure ; and in its
processes it pays no attention to the convenience of either
individuals or communities. Consequently those internal com
motions, which in fact are but the indications of a healthy and
developing community, always have made miserable, and ever
will make miserable, the lives of the well-to-do, the comfortable
and the conservative. They are doing so now with us here, as
well as with others elsewhere.
In our case, too, the new forces at work are unquestionably
active and far-reaching, — not impossibly they may be subver
sive; but at least they find a ready vent, and hence it fol
lows that, though there may be — and, indeed, unquestionably
has been — a temporary deterioration, no necessity exists
for violent action, since there is no desire for and no at
tempt at forcible repression. Herein much is gained. Each
thought, each need, each craving or new impulse, intellectual

28 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE.
or material, is left to develop in its own way, with the convic
tion on the part of all that trial and discussion are the only
tests from which there is no appeal. The twentieth century
has thus much advanced over the fifteenth; and America to
day occupies a better position than Russia or England, as they
stand there holding their nihilistic and Irish wolves by the
ears. Whether we personally want it or not, new light has got
to come : but there are various kinds of light ; and it makes all
the difference in the world whether the new light breaks as a
quiet and gradual dawn, no matter how obscured and stormy
in aspect, or whether it comes from the lurid glare of a
rumbling volcano.
It was not until the century now ended was drawing near
its close that we here in Quincy fully realized that the change
through which others had passed was immediately impending
over us. For some years, as we watched the rapid growth of
the town and the development of its functions of government,
an uneasy feeling had, it is true, crept abroad that things could
not forever go on in what we felt to be the good old way. We
were vaguely conscious, in spite of ourselves, of the presence
of that skeleton in the closet. But never had government
through town-meeting worked better or brought about more
satisfactory results, material and financial, than since 1870; and
we, not unwisely, I think, deferred the impending issue until,
in 1888, it was forced upon us by the unmistakable progress
of events. Then the problem, of which we had heard so much
elsewhere, confronted us ; and, girding ourselves for our work,
we undertook to try our hand at a solution. We are, of course,
not yet far enough advanced in the path of practical results
to speak with any confidence of the outcome of our effort, but
the effort was at least an honest, an intelligent and a credi
table one; as such, moreover, it has attracted a certain degree
of interest from without. Of that effort, its significance, its
merits and its shortcomings, I now propose to say something.
Having looked back over the road by which we reached the
spot where we are, and on which our centennial milestone will
stand, it is time once more to peer forward over the beginning
of the next stage in our journey.

THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 29
An experience, now.no longer short and still fast increasing,
seems to indicate that one cause of the trouble experienced in
our city governments is that they have from the beginning
been organized on a defective model, — that they followed an
analogy which was not applicable, — the model of the consti
tutions of the State and of the United States. The municipal
government was assumed to be analogous to the political gov
ernment. In fact it was and is nothing of the sort: the state
is a political entity ; the municipality, a mere business organ
ization. Accordingly, it is no part of the proper function of
those handling municipal affairs to consider philosophical
principles of state-craft. They are, on the contrary, persons
selected by the constituencies to do the work intrusted to
them, because the constituent masses have grown so large that
they can no longer meet in one body to do that work them
selves. The function of the municipal officer is, therefore, to,
administer the affairs of a local community in an intelligent
and business-like way. Nevertheless, in Massachusetts the
municipal governments have always been traditionally framed
with the cumbrous machinery of the larger political bodies.
They have, as matter of course, had their boards of aldermen,
representing the senate, and their common councils, represent
ing the more popular branch of the Legislature, instead of the
simple executive and board of directors of innumerable other
business organizations. Indeed, it seems almost to have been
assumed as a maxim by the framers of the city charters that
municipal machinery would work more efficiently in proportion
to its clumsiness and intricacy. Again, the functions of the
several departments of .the ordinary city government have, in
the course of time, become hopelessly confused. Responsi
bility has ceased to exist; for the legislative has by degrees
encroached on the executive until, in the greater number of
cities, the mayor is reduced to a mere cipher, while certain
irresponsible combinations in the legislative chambers and
city halls, generally known as " rings," really control the ad
ministration of affairs. Almost of necessity, the executive
functions have more and more fallen into the hands of com
missions and boards, as the special requirements for the suc-
S

30 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE.
cessful management of streets^ sewers, lighting, police, etc.,
grow in importance. These boards, if not irresponsible, are
as a rule and under existing city organizations not responsible
to the chief executive.
Public attention had for years been forcibly call-ed to theSe
gathering difficulties by the occurrence of scandals of ever-
increasing notoriety, more and more discussed, which those
who drew up our Quincy charter bore freshly in mind. Ac
cordingly, that charter, framed in consultation with individ
uals both within and without the State who had made a special
study of the subject, was based on correct political theories in
one respect at least, — in so far as was practicable, it was not
a creation, but an outgrowth. In this matter, the principle at
the base of all successful constitutional government was care
fully regarded, — the fundamental principle that " everything
which has power to win the obedience and respect of men must
have its roots deep in the past, and that the more slowly every
institution has grown, so much the more enduring it is likely
to prove." Changing, therefore, in the least degree possible,
the system to which the community had long been accustomed,
those who framed our Quincy charter proposed simply to do
away with the old board of selectmen as an executive body,
and with the town-meeting as a legislative body, and to substi
tute for them respectively a reponsible single executive, and a
council much in the nature of a board of corporation directors.
The framers of the charter in distributing the powers and
functions of the proposed government followed, and followed
correctly, the maxim that " Delibera!tion is the work of many,
- Execution is the work of one ; " and while to the council of
Quincy under its charter all proper deliberative and directive
liberty was allotted, the Mayor of Quincy was avowedly in
tended to be clothed with a larger and more arbitrary power
within his department than had ever in the United States been
confided to the executive head of any organization classed as
political.' Such was and is the Quincy charter, — our attempt at a solu
tion of the great problem now vexing the nation. It was a new
1 See Appendix E, p. 49.

THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. • 3 1
departure, — a departure carefully prepared, in full sympathy
with the current political theories of the day ; and then under-
standingly entered upon. Whether it will prove a successful
departure, — a veritable and valuable contribution to political
science, — remains to be seen; but whether in the result it
does. or does not so prove, it was and is, as I have said, none
the less an honest, an intelligent and a well-considered attempt
at the solution of the problem.
And now, having said this much, let us look at the thing from
another point of view ; for we may rest assured that, before any
final result is reached, ¦ — at least if that result is to be of a satis
factory and not of a chaotic character, — this thing has got to
be studied as well as looked at from every conceivable point of
view. From another point of view may it not be that in the
Quincy charter the fatal mistake was made of endeavoring to
devise a governmental machinery which should do the work the
citizen only can do with success ? Of late the effort has un
questionably been, through some ingenious and careful readjust
ment of the parts of government and their relations to the
community and each other, to invent a mere machine, which,
once set in motion, will work of itself, — a kind of nickel-in-the-
slot political arrangement, under which the citizen will be saved
the trouble of doing anything, except periodically dropping an
improved ballot into a patented ballot-box.
More than a century and a half ago an English poet, a
good deal more read formerly than now, epigrammatically
exclaimed — " For forms of government let fools contest :
That which is best administered is best."
While this certainly is not now, and never was, wholly true,
yet there is truth, in it,^ a degree of truth of which the charter
theorists need to be reminded now that they are so plainly tend
ing to the opposite theory, that, in municipal governments at
any rate, everything is in the form, the proper distribution
of functions and concentration of responsibility — that, in
short, if we are only patient and ingenious enough in device, a
charter can in time be produced which, once set in motion, will

32 • THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE.
grind out a correct and satisfactory administration of municipal
affairs. May it not be that, after all, the Quincy charter was to
some extent an attempt of this sort, — an attempt to secure
through mechanical means that which a disinterested and
widely diffused public spirit and co-operative action only ever
have brought about yet, or probably ever will bring about
hereafter ?
If this is so, it needs no prophet's eye to foresee that our
Quincy charter is, as the solution of a difficult problem, not des
tined to prove a success. When Mr. Bryce, in the extracts from
his work already quoted, said that, as respects American muni
cipal affairs, " we find able citizens absorbed in their private
business, cultivated citizens unusually sensitive to the vulgari
ties of practical politics, and both sets therefore specially un
willing to sacrifice their time and tastes and comforts in the
struggle" of civic administration, — when Mr. Bryce wrote
this, he touched with the point of his pen the true seat of
trouble. More than that, he indicated the only possible remedy
for it.
It is good to frame charters and constitutions ; it is well to
devise ingenious political expedients ; it is refreshing to ob
serve the working of nicely balanced paper adjustments : — but,
by themselves and of themselves, it is most improbable that in
the present or any other respect these will ever work out the
pohtical salvation of a community which depends upon them.
The Quincy charter, I will also add, however excellent it may
be in theory, will in the coming years not work out the muni
cipal salvation of Quincy. Of that much at least we can even
now feel assured. Something else is necessary ; and that some
thing is men, — and, moreover, the very best men this or any
other town or city now can or ever will supply. The solution,
and the only solution, of the problem which torments us may
be as easy to point out as it is difficult to secure. In looking
for it, also, it may not be necessary to go very far afield.
I venture to suggest, also, that in the matter of municipal rule
and administration we might to-day derive useful hints from the
experience in another field of France and Italy, and yet more of
Germany. Those nations have their skeletons in the closet, —

THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 33
their problems which must be solved, — as we have ours. Ade
quate security against internal disorder or foreign aggression is
their problem. Their solution of it is compulsory military ser
vice. Our problem is good municipal government. Might not
its solution be found in a species of compulsory municipal ser
vice } The suggestion of such a thing may at first seem futile
and almost foolish ; yet, perhaps, the more it is considered, the
less idle will it appear. In republican America, no less than de
spotic Russia, the community has, so far as the individual citizen
is concerned, — no matter who that citizen maybe, or what his
vocation, or what his estate, — the community has over him a
certain right of eminent domain ; and a right which within rea
sonable limits it should exercise. To say this is merely to
assert, what no one will deny, that every citizen is towards the
government which protects him under obligations of duty a
quittance for which is not included in the receipt of the tax-
collector. If then the public exigency demands, and the de
mand can in no other way be met, just as the German govern
ment puts its hand on every German, — high-born or low-born,
rich or poor, — and puts him for a term of years into the ranks
of its army, exacting from him this forced service on public ac
count, — so, under our institutions and in the spirit of them, you
here in Quincy, and by the same principle those there in Bos
ton and in New York and in San Francisco, have a right to
lay hands on any citizen of your or their municipality, be he
rich or poor, prominent or obscure, educated or ignorant, and
exact of him a term of municipal service, if you see fit so to
do ; and moreover, just as in Germany a physical disability or
papers of discharge alone give exemption from military duty,
so here, if a proper system prevailed, only a similar disability
or a reasonable term of duty performed, ought to secure ex
emption from municipal service. Not only under a republican
system of government is this, I repeat, the right of the commu
nity, but more than that, it is its duty to exercise the right, and
to enforce its exercise by all necessary means.
The enunciation of such a doctrine of public right and pri
vate duty will, I know, sound strange now, and by most be
regarded as theoretic. I greatly fear, also, that as a practical

34 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE.
remedy it is out of the question, being opposed to that ten
dency or drift of public opinion and unwritten law of usage
than which nothing is more difficult to reverse or overcome.
If such is the case, — if municipal service cannot be put on
the same plane as jury duty, — it remains only to accept the
situation, and to go on treating that service in the future as
we have treated it in the more recent past, as a voluntary con
tribution to be made by those of more public spirit, and with
held by those of less. But if such is indeed the case, let no
one hug himself in the pleasing delusion that the results of
American municipal government in the future will be any
more satisfactory than they have been heretofore. Most as
suredly they will not, for it will then be evident that the root
of the trouble is in the decay of public spirit ; and neither
charters nor systems of checks and balances, no matter how
intricate or how cunningly devised, ever were or ever will be
an adequate substitute for public spirit. On the contrary,
those devices become then a delusion and a snare.
Such a theory of public right and private duty may to some
also sound Utopian rather than merely theoretic. To such,
if such there be, I will merely say : It was not always so ! —
and in proof thereof, I with all confidence appeal to the record.
Listen, and you will learn, very possibly to your surprise, that
what you now dismiss as Utopian, — that very compulsory
municipal service, irrespective of every social distinction, which
I have suggested, not only formerly prevailed here in Quincy,
but was enforced by a money penalty as well as by public
opinion. And first, I call as a witness one who, it will be
remembered, before being President of the United States,
served two successive years as a selectman of Braintree.
John Adams graduated at Harvard College in 1755, and six
years later, in 1761, was a young lawyer just beginning prac
tice in his native town. Here is his experience, recounted by
himself, of compulsory municipal service as then practised :
" In March [of that year], when I had no suspicion, I heard my
name pronounced [at town-meeting] in a nomination of surveyors
of highways. I was very wroth, because I knew no better, but said
nothing. My friend Dr. Savil came to me and told me that he had

THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 35
nominated me to prevent me from being nominated as a constable.
' For,' said the doctor, ' they make it a rule to compel every man to
serve either as constable or surveyor, or to pay a fine.' I said they
might as well have chosen any boy in school, for I knew nothing of
the business ; but since they had chosen me at a venture, I would
accept it in the same manner, and find out my duty as I could."
Now for other cases of the enforcement of this rule of com
pulsory municipal service. Your ancient records are full of
them, nor were any exemptions allowed. For instance, in
1734 Josiah Quincy, then a young man of twenty-five, was
elected constable, and the tovvn constable in those days col
lected the town taxes, — a duty even more odious then than
now, for to it a financial liability for the entire levy attached
by law : to this office of constable the Josiah Quincy of that
day was chosen in the Braintree town-meeting of 1734; and
the record goes on, "Mr. Josiah Quincy refused to serve, and
paid his fine down, being five pounds." So John Borland,
belonging to one of the few wealthy families in the town, a
member of the Church of England society, and subsequently
a Tory, was chosen constable in 1756, though then excused
from serving; but in 1757 he was chosen again, and appears
to have served. In 1774 General Joseph Palmer, being then
fifty-eight, a man of fortune and a deacon, was duly chosen
constable at the annual March meeting, over which he was at
the time presiding as moderator ; but he " refused serving, as
incompatible with his church office." In 1728, Moses Belcher
was chosen ; and he declaring non-acceptance, William Fields
was next chosen ; Fields also declaring his non-acceptance,
"John Adams, being by a majority of votes chosen, he de
clared his acceptance." In 1735 no less than twenty-five
pounds were paid in as fines for non-acceptance ; and those
fines were looked upon as so considerable a source of revenue
that in 1730 it had been voted that the money accruing on this
account should be for the benefit, not of the town as a whole,
but of the particular precincts in which the individuals who
paid it might live. Col. John Quincy's only son, Norton,
graduated in 1756, and two years later, at the town-meeting
of September 11, he was chosen constable. Another meeting

36 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE.
was held a week afterwards. Colonel Quincy was then a man
of nearly seventy, and for almost fifty years he had been the
most prominent personage in the town. He was looked up to
with that respect which, in the popular mind, always accom
panies advancing. years associated with high personal charac
ter and the long holding of public office. The old man seems
to have thought the choice of his son as town constable an act
derogatory to himself; so he went into the second meeting,
and, as the record says, "desired his son might be excused
from serving constable." Among those to whom this request
was addressed there could not have been many who remem
bered a time when the man who made it had not, as a matter
of course, presided at town-meetings. They were not wanting
in deference to years and standing ; and if they would defer to
any one, they would surely defer to him after whom the North
Precinct as an independent town was subsequently named.
But, clearly, they thought that Colonel Quincy was now de
manding for himself and his an exemption from public service
which amounted to little less than a denial of equality. Such
an assumption of superiority was inconsistent with the spirit
of town government. And so, the record proceeds, "after
reasons offered," the request to be excused was "passed in
the negative," and the town treasurer was directed " to call on
said Norton Quincy for his fine." Apparently the old man
felt this slight, as he regarded it, deeply ; for his name does
not appear again in the town records, though it was nine
years yet before he died. But young Norton Quincy accepted
the rebuke in the true spirit. He paid his fine, and the next
year, when the town again chose him constable, he quietly
accepted the office and performed its duties. Later he was
chosen selectman, serving as such for many years during the
revolutionary period.
So stands the record on the point that in Quincy here there
is nothing novel in the idea of compulsory municipal service,
or in its practical enforcement. In former days a man could
not be called upon to serve forever as town-constable, nor
could he properly be called upon to serve perpetually now as
a mayor or as member of your city council ; but he was then

THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 37
compelled to serve his reasonable term of municipal duty in
the positions to which his fellow-townsmen called him, and
now he should be compelled to do the same. Nor wealth nor
indolence nor private occupation sufficed to secure exemp
tion then ; nor should they suffice to secure it now.
I have also said that the American municipality is entitled
to the service of its best men. But who are your " best men " .?
— for, in politics, this phrase sometimes excites a sneer, as
though in that field the talking of " best men " seemed to con
tain an implied and undemocratic assertion that for civic
purposes all men are not equal. By " best men," therefore,
are meant those who in the ordinary walks of life — on the
street, in the court-room, the sick-chamber and the market
place — are recognized as most successful in their callings.
If you are going to organize a bank or a manufacturing or a
railroad company, you do not select from among its stock
holders a list of directors largely composed of those who have
notoriously failed in whatever else they have undertaken, or
who are otherwise discredited. You carefully select, on the
contrary, men known to have been shrewdest and most suc
cessful in the management of their own affairs, and who stand
highest in the estimate of the stockholders. Has the same
practice been followed as a rule in the make-up of the boards
of aldermen and common councils of our cities ? Yet in what
way, so far as good business management is concerned, does a
public corporation differ from a private corporation .' ^ By the
" best men " of a municipality, therefore, is meant those who
are recognized and looked to as best and most successful in
the ordinary walks of life : and it is to a reasonable share of
the services of these that, I insist, every municipality is entitled
as of right ; and, moreover, that its claim should he enforced,
where public opinion does not suffice, by such other means,
whether of obloquy or pecuniary loss, as might be found
necessary to bring about the desired result.
Herein, I submit, might be found one factor, and a most im
portant factor, in the solution of our problem. But the sug
gestion of it will be met with the objection that, through the
1 See Appendix F, p. 58.

38 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE.
working of the political machinery now in use, and to which
as a community we are thoroughly accustomed, the best men
are not selected for office. The machine, indeed, is not worked
to that end. Far from it ; the professionals who make a busi
ness of manipulating the caucus are to the modern citizen,
honestly minded but engrossed in his private affairs, very
much what armed mercenaries were to the town mob in old
feudal days, — nine times out of ten they are absolute masters
of the situation. They nominate whom they please ; and, in
municipal office, they have no use whatever for the commu
nity's " best men."
There is force, too, and a great deal of force, in this practical
view of the subject. It is true — and for us very sadly true
— that the whole underlying political machinery now in com
mon use in American cities (and in Quincy, it may fairly be
presumed, like the rest) is admirably adapted — as admira
bly adapted as if it were so designed — to put control securely
in the hands of the professionals. The caucus system supple
ments the ward system. To be in public life in America, —
whether in the National Congress or the city government, — a
man must be a member of the political majority in the locality
in which he chances to live. A political system better adapted
to throwing control into the hands of those who will use it for
ulterior and selfish ends, and for keeping the "best men" out
of the field of public usefulness, could not be devised : and so
it is against this part of the existing political machinery, I
submit, that the charter-makers and reformers should now be
directing their efforts, rather than in the direction of more
ingenious contrivances for the division of functions and the
concentration of responsibility. The difficulty is in the basis
of representation. We reach our results to-day by the process
of counting noses, /w and con, within the pales of certain geo
graphical ring-fences known as district and ward lines !
The puzzle, therefore, the charter-reformer has to work out,
if he is going to get down to the root of the matter, is some
practical system which shall secure the utmost political free
play to the individual citizen, and the representation of minor
ities in municipal affairs ; having done this, — having thus set

THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 39
individuals free and made minorities potent, — it will be for
those composing the minorities to put their hands, as of old,
on the shoulders of the " best men," and exact of them com
pulsory municipal service, those civic tours of public duty.
On this problem the past throws no light. You may search
with a conveyancer's care the pages of the Braintree records,
or your own record-books of Quincy, but you will find nothing
in them to aid you. The environments are all new; the
adjustment to those environments must be equally new : but
you will be uncomfortable all the same, — you will toss about
like Dante's " sick man who cannot find rest upon his bed,"
— until that adjustment is effected, and correctly effected.
It may, unquestionably it does, seem strange that in a matter
of such moment the precedents to guide us should be so
few, — that no finger-posts exist along the road we must
travel. Indeed, were it not plainly so, it would be thought in
credible that, after nearly three centuries of active experience,
the English-speaking race should in such a matter as local
municipal government cling to a system which leaves it to arbi
trary geographical lines to supply the basis of representation,
instead of seeking it in a common purpose existing among
bodies of citizens. It is not easy to conceive of anything
more illogical and crude, or, it may be added, more oppressive.
But the absence of precedent in no way affects the situation.
The situation is bad : nor will the trouble be settled until it is
settled right. We are now represented by men because they
live in the next street to us, not because they and we, think
ing alike on municipal matters, want to act together. It would
surely require no great degree of ingenuity to devise a local
municipal system under which it would be practicable for
a scattered constituency — no longer imprisoned within ward
lines so that those composing it may the more conveniently
be throttled by ward politicians — so to concentrate itself as to
escape complete suppression. It would not be profitable for
me to discuss this matter further, for nothing which could be
uttered here and now will perceptibly affect results. These
things work themselves out by a law of their own ; and being
impatient or scolding at the slow course of events is of no

40 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE.
earthly use. If there is anything good or practicable in what
has here been suggested, it will come under the pressure of
necessity, and all in good time. Assured of this, we can
afford to withdraw our gaze from the lengthening, onward
road before us, with confident faith that just as the eighteenth
century saw with us a system of compulsory municipal service
in accepted and active operation, so the twentieth century will
devise for us — if such a thing is really worth devising — some
practical method of minority municipal representation which
shall restore that system in a shape adapted to existing condi
tions, by utilizing to the utmost those saving forces of individ
uality in the citizen which are now ignorantly wasted, where
not systematically suppressed.
Not much remains to be said. Such as it is, the milestone
is planted, and in a few hours more those composing our
Quincy column of to-day — men and women, young and old,
coming together from hall and street and park — will take up
their burdens and again resume the line of march. The ban
ners may be rolled up and the mottoes put away ; for an
hundred years must pass before those who are to succeed us
will stop again to rest for a time and look back over a like vista.
It is not profitable to attempt to divine the course of future
events, for the unexpected is apt to occur: but, as our Quincy
column winds its slow length along the dusty road or through
the pastures new, it may at least be given us to hope that
the Providence which watched over the fathers will not hide
its countenance from the children.
" Lead, Kindly Light, amid th' encircling gloom.
Lead Thou us on ;
The night is dark, and we are far from home,
Lead Thou us on.

" So long Thy power hath blessed us, sure it still
Will lead us on.
O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till
The night is gone."

OLD PLYMOUTH ROAD.
Twelfth Milestone.

APPENDIX.

A.
' I '"HE lack of appreciation of the ever-growing historical interest
which attaches to monuments and local nomenclature has
already led to the destruction of much which lends individuality to
Quincy, as to other ancient towns. It is not easy to say whether
the utilitarian stone-mason and surveyor of highways, or the pro
gressive land-speculator, has, in this respect, the heavier load of
responsibility to carry. Good reasons can be urged against the
preservation of ancient buildings, except in very exceptional cases.
In course of time they become unfit for modern use, and, indeed,
on sanitary grounds, for human habitation ; while altogether too
frequently they stand in the way of changes and needed improve
ments : but these arguments do not apply to old-time memorials and
monuments, or to traditional nomenclature. These are apt to be
interesting ; and they are never in the way.
Take for instance the provincial milestones on the road from
Boston to Plymouth. Chief-Justice Paul Dudley, early in the last
century, placed a line of these through Roxbury to the Dorchester
line, marking them with his initials, "P. D." Another line, mark
ing "The lower way "from Stoughton's Mill, or Milton Lower Falls,
to Boston, was planted by Governor Belcher about 1734 {History of
Milton,^^. 112-113). The seventh and eighth stones, bearing respec
tively the dates 1722 and 1723, but without initials, are still standing
on the west and south roadside in Milton. The ninth, the first of
the series in Quincy, is referred to in the text, and is reproduced in
the frontispiece to this Address. At least one attempt has been
made to remove and "utilize" this stone for some such purpose as
repairing a wall or covering a drain ; but the emphatic objection of
members of the Newcomb family, whose house stood opposite to it.

42 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE.
prevented, in this case, an act of stupid and ignorant desecration.
The tenth stone — an historical landmark in Old Braintree and
Quincy — stood in its proper place by the roadside in the centre
of the town, until one day, some twenty years ago, a stone-mason,
building one of those fortifications known as ornamental stone walls
in front of the house of the late Lemuel Brackett, seized upon it,
tore it up and cut it to pieces, and inserted a portion of it in the
wretched wall he was constructing. The portion thus preserved bears
the initial letter, " B," and the distance figures (lo) from Boston;
the rest of the stone is gone. The eleventh milestone stood close to
the so-called Adams houses at the foot of Penn's Hill. Less fortu
nate than the tenth, this milestone wholly disappeared years ago,
and no trace of it remains. It was probably taken possession of
by the masons engaged in building the Samuel Curtis house in 1830
(Quincy Patriot, Oct. 26, 1889) : and they, with no idea whatever
of the act of desecration they were committing, not improbably used
it in common with the stones of the old boundary wall, near the
street end of which it is said to have stood, as foundation material.
Indeed, the tradition is that all this stone was "utihzed" for the
underpinning of the barn built close behind the house, and still
standing. If such is the case, it is within the bounds of possibility
that the old eleventh milestone may yet be recovered, and restored to
the place where it stood for more than a century. The twelfth
milestone still stands on the rising ground beyond the southern
slope of Penn's Hill, on the easterly side of the road. It bears,
besides the indications of distance and date (1727), two sets of
initials, I. M. and I. H. I have not ascertained of whom they are
commemorative. Some years ago a highly utilitarian surveyor of
highways seized on this stone as a handy cover for a drain or
culvert he was engaged in constructing. Fortunately this act of
vandalism came to the knowledge of Samuel A. Bates, the veteran
town clerk and antiquarian of Braintree, who bestirred himself in
time, and was lucky enough to induce the selectmen to interfere
and preserve the memorial.
It has been the same with the names of streets and localities.
The section of the ancient historical coast road of Massachusetts
Bay, provided for by action of the General Court in 1639, the
route of which through Old Braintree was fixed finally in 1648, —
this most interesting of all New England roads, connecting, as it
did, Boston with Plymouth when both were the capitals of separate
colonies, — this Coast Road, instead of being known as such, or.

APPENDIX. 43
at least, if it must be modernized, as "The Plymouth Road," or even
as "Plymouth Street," — this ancient thoroughfare has, in Quincy,
been divided up under the meaningless names of Adams, Hancock,
School and Franklin streets ! The eager desire people, especially
the residents in suburban towns and cities, have for living in a
" Street " or on an " Avenue " is marked, and productive, tradition
ally, of disastrous results. Though Park Lane in London is one of
the most fashionable quarters of the metropolis of the British Empire,
it is currently supposed that the dweller in the outskirts of what is
known as a " five American town " cannot sleep quietly in bed if he,
or more usually she, lives in a house in a "Road "or a "Lane."
Accordingly, in Quincy, not only has the Old Plymouth Road been
dismembered and brought to life again in the way just described,
but, among other and similar cases, " Col. Quincy's Gate " has been
re-baptized as Bridge Street, and "The President's Lane," so called
because John Adams opened it to reach his cow-pasture on Stony-
Field' Hill, has been converted — Heaven only knows why — into
Goffe, or Goflee, Street. Finally, the noble tree-lined private avenue
laid out from the Neponset turnpike to his dwelling by the third
Josiah Quincy, nearly a century ago, instead of being known for
all time as " President Quincy's Avenue," has lately turned up as
commonplace Elm Avenue.
But the worst act of vandalism of this sort is the most recent. In
the northern portion of Quincy, near Squantum, there was a region
known from time immemorial as the " Farms District." It was a
broad plain some distance south of the Neponset, and lying between
the bay front and the swamps through which the line of the Old
Colony railroad was ruri. In all Massachusetts there was no site
of greater historical interest than this, for from it the Commonwealth
may, in some sense, be said to have derived its name. Writing in
1633, William Woods said of it: "This place is called Massachu
setts Fields, where the greatest Sagamore in the country lived, before
the plague, who caused it to be cleared for himself." Accordingly it
was to this point that Miles Standish and his fellow explorers from
Plymouth directed their course when, on the 2'9th of September,
1 62 1, they made their first visit to the country of the Massachusetts
{Memorial History of Boston, vol. i. p. 64). It was the central gath
ering place — at once the play-field and the muster-ground — of that
"goodly, strong and well-proportioned people" whom the redoubt
able Captain John Smith described as being " very kind, but in
their fury no less valiant."

44 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE.
In the winter of 1891-92 this historical spot — -the spot which
was to the Massachusetts what the Isthmian Fields were to the
Greeks — passed into the hands of a suburban land company. As
one means of bringing it into notice, the promoters of the enterprise
advertised for a name, offering a sura of money as a prize for that
which should be selected as most euphonious and appropriate.
From this ordeal the Massachusetts Fields emerged as " Norfolk
Downs " ! It might, with far greater propriety and significance, have
been designated Billings' Upland.
But Norfolk Downs is merely the last historical misnomer. The
next to the last was nearly, though not quite, as bad. In 1870
Taylor's Hill in North Quincy passed into the hands of a land
company, and, as usual, went in search of a name. It shortly re
appeared as Wollaston Heights ; by which designation it since has
been, and hereafter doubtless will be, known. Dimblebee Heights
would have been quite as appropriate (Braintree Records, p. 30).
On the other hand, Taylor's Hill might well have been given a name
of the greatest possible historical significance. As the investigations
of Mr. Edwin W. Marsh, — that "valued friend" of mine "of the
antique stock," to whom I have referred in the opening of this
Address, — as Mr. Marsh's investigations have shown, Taylor's Hill
and the whole surrounding region covered by the Wollaston Heights
settlement, was a portion of the tract, including six hundred acres,
allotted in 1636 by the town of Boston to William Hutchinson, the
husband of that Mistress Anne Hutchinson whose name is burned
deep into the early history of Massachusetts. It was to her hus
band's house on this grant that Anne Hutchinson came on her way
to Rhode Island when banished from the colony of Massachusetts
Bay in April, 163S. Wollaston Heights is therefore another mean
ingless misnomer ; the locality should have been called Hutchinson
Heights. The name would then have signified much.

B.
There is no branch of modern science the conclusions reached in
which have undergone greater or more constant revisions than have
those reached in geology. As matter of future, and at some remote
day possibly of curious, reference, it may be worth while to state
briefly the theory at this time most currently accepted of the latest

APPENDIX. 45
.geological reconstruction of the territory now included in the limits
of Quincy.
Prior to the last glacial period the New England coast line is
supposed to have run some fifty or sixty miles farther east and
south than it now does, along what is known as the Continental
Shelf. The territory which now constitutes Quincy was, therefore,
at that time an inland locality, some two hundred feet higher above
the sea-level than it now is. The Merrimac River, instead of
turning towards the north at Lowell, as at present, flowed in a south
easterly direction, finding its way to the ocean through the depres
sion which is now Boston Harbor. As respects the ocean, the site
of Quincy, therefore, was somewhat as Springfield now is, — perhaps
an equal distance from the sea-board and on a river of not much less
magnitude than the Connecticut. Like the neighboring region, the
Blue Hills and Mount Ararat stood some two hundred feet higher
than they now do, while the other Quincy hills (with the exception
probably of Penn's Hill), Taylor's Hill, Forbes' Hill, President's
Hill and Great Hill, — the drumlins, as they are called by geol
ogists, — did not exist. They are all of glacial formation.
During the last glacial period there was probably from three
to five thousand feet of solid ice over the highest summit of the
Blue Hills. After the ice layers had attained a certain thickness a
perceptible subsidence of the earth's surface followed. This process
of subsidence went slowly and steadily on under the increasing pres
sure until the bulk of the ice disappeared. The subsidence then
amounted to some two hundred feet, and the present shore-line
of Quincy was accordingly submerged. After the disappearance
of the bulk of the ice the crust of the earth rose again with, geo
logically speaking, considerable rapidity, some twenty feet above
the present coast-line ; then, reacting, it reached what has since that
time been the established level. The Quincy territory became sea
board, and the local geological outlines have not since undergone
material change.
During the glacial period, and especially after the ice began to
melt and retreat, several sub-glacial rivers evidently discharged
their waters through ice-tunnels tending in a southeasterly direc
tion across the northerly portion of Quincy. The line of the Blue
Hills not impossibly served as a barrier of retardation in the retreat
of the glaciers. One of these sub-glacial streams evidently dis
charged itself on the summit of what is now known as Forbes' Hill,
as the ponds on the summit of that hill, and the deep erosive de-
7

46 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE.
pressions on each side of it clearly show. This and other streams
flowing farther north, reached the sea through what is now known as
Black's Creek, forming, as the ice disappeared, the kames and kettle-
holes clearly to be distinguished in the Merry Mount Park and the
low grounds north of Wollaston Heights.
Through the forward flow of ice, during the glacial period, the soil
overlying the granite and slate bed-rocks of Quincy was much
eroded and borne away towards the southeast. In place of the soil
thus removed a new glacial deposit was made on the lines now ex
isting, of which the Quincy drumlins, already referred to, are the
distinguishing feature. One of the present theories of geologists,
and a theory as plausible as any yet suggested, is that these drum
lins were accumulations in the bed of the ice movement of much the
same character as those now seen wherever a body of water runs
over a comparatively level bottom. In such cases, any obstacle
which causes the current to move more slowly in one portion of the
channel than in another, will lead to an accumulation of soil or ma
terial at the point of slackening. In this way, wherever, after the
original surface-soil was removed by the ice-flow, there existed on
the surface of the country a ledge or other unusual obstacle, such as
an accumulation of boulders more easily surmounted than removed,
the movement of the ice would be retarded and a mound of glacial
deposit accumulated greater or less in proportion to circumstances.
At the same time other portions of the surface, where less resistance
was met, would be eroded to a corresponding degree. The exist
ence of the drumlins, and the corresponding depressions and water
courses, are in this way accounted for on a theory at least plausible ;
though numerous other theories hardly less plausible are also ad
vanced, and can be found in the text-books (Wright, Ice Age of
North America, chap. xi.).
The remoteness of these changes in point of time is up to the
present a subject of much question among geologists. Some main
tain that the glacial period was at least fifty thousand years ago ;
while others argue that it was not more than eight or ten thou
sand. In the case of Quincy the superficial indications strongly
favor the shorter period. The marks of glacial action in the shape
of kames, ponds and drumlins are so fresh that it is difficult to
believe a period of even eight thousand years can have elapsed since
the action which created these features of Quincy. The drumlins,
for instance, are covered as a rule with a deposit of vegetable loam
not over ten inches in depth. As is well understood by geologists,

APPENDIX. 47
the accumulation of loam goes on under some law the conditions of
which do not yet admit of statement, and no inference as to age can
safely be drawn from the presence or absence of that deposit ; but
assuming that only eight thousand years have elapsed since the end
of the glacial period, it would follow that the vegetable accumulation
on the Quincy hills has not exceeded an inch and a half in a
thousand years. As these drumlins were, until within the last two
hundred years, covered with trees and undergrowth in the same way
that the Blue Hills and other uncultivated upland portions of Quincy
now are, it is not easy to see how the accumulations of vegetable
deposit could have been so slow. Admitting the argument that this
accumulation was prevented by the natural process of erosion, and
especially by the heavy rains which must have marked the earlier
period after the disappearance of the ice, it would follow that the
drumlins ought to be cut deep by ravines, the channels of water
courses, and that a large accumulation of soil would be found in the
adjacent valleys. Such is not the case. The drumlins bear no indi
cations of extensive erosion, or, indeed, of any erosion, except of a
gradual and equal character ; neither is there any undue accumula
tion of soil in the valleys. On the other hand, such accumulation
as has taken place, in swamps and elsewhere, is indicative of the
passage of a brief geological period only. In fact, were not the
indications at other points clear that the ice period occurred at least
eight thousand years ago, the surface evidence in Quincy would lead
lay or superficial observers to infer that hardly an eighth part of that
time could have elapsed.

c.
Among the reasons for the incorporation of Quincy as an inde
pendent town, assigned in the petition of January, 1791, was the
following : —
" Your petitioners impressed with Common sentiments of their Country
have a warm desire of seeing their Children educated in such a manner as
is best adapted to render them the most useful members of Society and
as they inhabit a long extent of Sea coast, their Character and habits of
life will naturally take a maritime cast and an education adapted to fit
them for trade navigation fishery and their attendant arts and manufac
tures would be very desirable, and as your petitioners humbly conceive
would be greatly advanced under such an incorporation where those that

48 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE.
advance their money for Schools might apply it to the best advantage
and our youth be thereby rendered more extensively useful to their families
and beneficial to the publick."
Following the sea during the eighteenth century would next to
agriculture seem to have been the favorite calling of the young men
of Braintree North Precinct. During the Revolution Mrs. Adams
wrote : " The rage for privateering is as great here as anywhere.
Vast numbers are employed in that way;" and in June, 1780,
when the privateer Essex, from Salem, was captured in the Eng-
hsh Channel, twelve Braintree young men were in her crew. Most
of them were from the North Precinct, and in proportion to popula
tion the loss was equivalent to that, possibly, of one hundred and
fifty young men in 1890.
The French Reign of Terror began with the decapitation of
Louis XVI. in January, 1793, in consequence of which war was de
clared against France by Great Britain in the following February.
At a special town-meeting, held in Quincy six months later, on
August 12 th, it was —
" Voted, that Benja. Beale Esq, Hon. Richard Cranch esq and Moses
Black esqr be a Committee to make a reply to a circular letter sent by
the Merchants and traders of the town of Boston to the Select Men of this
town. " Voted, that the above Committee be a standing Committee to see that
there be not any privateers fitted out from this place by any of the Citizens
of the United States or others against any of the Beligerent powers, in
order that a strict neutraUty may be kept between us and them."

D.
The petition for the incorporation of Quincy was presented to the
General Court in January, 1791. As stated in the text, it was signed
by one hundred and fifty persons, bearing fifty-nine different names.
Of these one hundred and fifty persons, one hundred and twenty-
nine were residents in the North Precinct of Braintree, five in those
portions of Dorchester, south of the Neponset, known as "the
Farms " and Squantum, nine in the adjacent easterly portion of
Milton, and seven in that portion of the Middle Precinct of Brain
tree known as "Knight's Neck." In the following list of the sep
arate family names found appended to the petition of 1791, Pierde,

APPENDIX.

49

Rowe and Rawson belonged to Milton, and the territory in which
they lived was not made part of Quincy. Randall was of Knight's
Neck, which was not annexed to Quincy until 1856, at which date
no one named Randall lived there. Those names in the list printed
in Roman are still borne by residents of Quincy, either descendants
of, or from the same stock as, those who signed the petition ; those
printed in Italics are either extinct in Quincy, or, if found there,
are borne by persons not of the same family as those bearing
the name who signed the petition. Making allowance for the
three Milton names of Pierce, Rowe and Rawson, but including
the Braintree name of Randall as resident in a locality subse
quently annexed to Quincy, it will be seen that twenty-eight out
of fifty-six family names, or one half of the whole number, have
within the century become extinct in Quincy, in persons of the
same stock. Many of them would doubtless be found in other
localities : —

Adams.

Burrill.

Hayden.

Pray.

Alley ne.

Chandler.

Hobart.

Quincy.

Aptkrop.

Cheseman.

Hollis.

Randall.

Arnold.

Clark.

Norton.

Rawson.

Beale.

Cleverly.

Howard.

Rowe.

Badcock.

Copeland.

Hunt.

Sanders.

Bass.

Cranch.

Marsh.

Savil.

Baxter.

Crane.

Mead.

Spear.

Belcher.

Crosby.

Mears.

Stetson.

Sicknell.

Curtis.

Miller.

Tirrell.

Billings.

Field.

Newcomb.

Turner.

Black.

Gay.

Nightingale.

Veasey.

Blanchard.

Glover.

Phipps.

Webb.

Brackett.

Hall.

Pierce.

White.

Brown.,

Hardwick.

Pratt.

The Quincy city charter may not improbably hereafter prove an
interesting document in the history of the gradual development of
the American municipaHty of the future, — that result to which the
country is now slowly groping its way. A somewhat detailed state
ment of thd course of events and line of discussion which led up to

50 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE.
it will, therefore, not be out of place, and may hereafter become
useful for reference.
The change from town to city government began to be actively
agitated in Quincy towards the close of the year 1884, and at a meet
ing of citizens of the Wollaston Heights district then held, a com
mittee was appointed to consider and report on the whole subject.
Subsequently at an adjourned meeting on the 3d of January, 1885,
Mr. Josiah Quincy, on behalf of the committee, presented an elabo
rate report, which was printed in full in the Quincy Patriot of
the following Saturday (January loth). As the charter subsequently
framed was in the main the work of Mr. Quincy, the following pass
age from this report is of interest as indicating the fundamental
principles on which the instrument was based : —
" The trouble with the usual form of city government is that it seems to
be framed for the purpose of hopelessly mixing up executive and legisla
tive functions, and securing general irresponsibility and inefficiency; city
ofiices are filled partly by election by the people, parfly by election by the
legislative body, partly by apppintment by the mayor without confirmation,
and partly by the mayor with confirmation by the legislative body; de
partments are headed by unpaid commissions of men having no special
knowledge of the work which they have under their charge; a new mayor
finds the offices filled with men over whom he has no control, and who hold
their places independent of his will. The result of such a system is that
very few men of proper executive ability are wilHng to take the office of
mayor, for they know that they will be held responsible if things go
wrong, without being given sufficient power to make them go right ; if the
right man occasionally happens to be elected, the result is public disap
pointment at seeing how little he is able to accomplish, and the discourage
ment of future efforts at reform. Public indignation vents itself against
the legislative body as a whole, without often being able to fix any respon
sibility upon any member or members of it. The legislative body usurps
most of the executive functions, and the result is inefficiency and extrava
gance, if not actual corruption. A class of small common-council politi
cians is created who make their living by some hook or crook out of
managing the affairs of the city. Such a condition of things, especially in
the large cities, is only too familiar to all. Your committee believes,
however, that these evils can be avoided, as they have been already in
some cities, by the adoption of a simple, business-like form of government.
The principal point should be to give the mayor full executive powers,
holding him to a strict responsibility to the people for the manner in
which he exercises them, and to confine the legislative body strictly to its
function, which has been well described as that of ' critics with the power
of the purse.' Such an apparently simple and reasonable proposition
involves, however, radical changes in the scheme of municipal government
adopted by all of the cities of this State."

APPENDIX. 5 1
A mass meeting of citizens of the town, at which some six or
seven hundred were present, was held in the Town Hall on the 8th
of January, and the subject of a change of government discussed,
the usual arguments for and against it being set forth by a number
of speakers ; and at an adjourned meeting, held on the 15th of the
same month, a committee of thirty was appointed to take the whole
subject into consideration. It was not until Monday, November 30th,
that another public meeting was held. Meanwhile the committee
had prepared majority and minority reports, the former in favor of
and the latter adverse to a change of government, and both reports
had been printed in the issue of the Quincy Patriot for Novem
ber 14th, 1885, where they can be found.
At the meeting of November 30th a strong opposition to the pro
posed change developed itself under the lead of Mr. H. H. Faxon
and Dr. William Everett ; but at an adjourned meeting held a week
later it was voted to appoint a committee of fifteen to frame a
charter and submit it for consideration at a future meeting. Of this
committee Mr. Theophilus King was chairman ; but the details of
the work committed to it were put in the hands of a sub-committee
consisting of Messrs. Josiah Quincy and Sigourney Butler.
For over a year the matter remained under the careful advisement
of these two gentlemen, both of whom were graduates of Harvard
College, Mr. Quincy having been graduated in the class of 1880,
and Mr. Butler in that of 1877 ; both also were lawyers, and felt a
keen interest in the subject they had under investigation. Accord
ingly they not only made a careful study of municipal government
in America, but put themselves in communication with every one
within convenient reach, — including, among many others, Mr.
Gamaliel Bradford of Boston, and Mayor Seth Low of Brooklyn,
N. Y., — who had made a special study of the subject, or had
practical experience in it.
The report of the committee, and a form of charter accompanying
it, was submitted through the columns of the Patriot of January 29,
1887. The following passage from this report is of interest as mat
ter of record, especially that portion of it which relates to the subject
of minority representation. This possible feature in municipal
government, referred to in the text as vital, was, it will be seen,
fully considered in framing the charter, but omitted from it on the
sole ground that the time for successfully introducing so novel a
feature into a city charter had not yet come. It was dangerous to
attempt everything at once : —

52 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE.
" The charter has been drawn on the general lines recommended in the
report of a former sub-committee of your body. The complete separation
of the legislative and executive departments of city government, which
was urged in that report as of the first importance, has been fully carried
out in the present draft. As this involves something of a departure from
the common form of city government, your committee venture to reca
pitulate some of the arguments formerly submitted. The extravagance,
inefficiency, and corruption which unhappily are so often seen in city gov
ernments can hardly be claimed to exist because they are approved by
a majority of the voters ; they exist, on the contrary, because the majority
are unable, through defects in the scheme of government, to secure an
honest and efficient administration of their affairs, and because a confused
and vicious municipal organization paralyzes all effort to secure good
government. The fundamental trouble in most city governments is their
failure to make a proper distinction between the legislative and executive
functions, and to keep them separate from each other. The necessity of
such separation is conceded in theory as one of the cardinal principles of
our republican government, but in practice it has been almost universally
ignored so far as cities are concerned. All of the corporate powers are
lodged in the mayor and the city council ; but in distributing these powers
between them the charter commonly gives to the council not only all of the
legislative, but an important part of the executive powers as well, and
leaves it free to usurp still further executive powers, according to the com
mon tendency of legislative bodies. In defiance of the maxim, 'Dehbera-
tion is the work of many, Execution is the work of one,' the soundness of
which is supported by all the past experience of the world, the attempt has
been made to conduct municipal governments upon the theory that execu
tion as well as deliberation may properly be made the work of many. The
natural result is inefficiency and extravagance, if not corruption. It is as
contrary to sound principles to give a city council the power to choose
executive officers, or to reject the mayor's appointment of such officers,
or to administer a department of the city government through a committee
of its members, as it would be to give a mayor the sole power to pass a
municipal ordinance or to make an appropriation. The circumstances
under which our government was founded naturally gave to those who
shaped its first institutions an excessive dread of a strong executive, and
led them to extend the legislative power at its expense. But the bitter
and costly experience of municipal misgovernment ought by this time
to have taught the lesson that there are greater dangers, at any rate so far
as the government of cities is concerned, than any that can attend the
granting of full executive powers to the mayor. To give such powers
does not remove the government further from the people ; on the contrary,
it brings it nearer to them, and renders it much more subject to their con
trol. Under a popular government experience has proved that one man
can nearly always be held stricdy responsible for the exercise of powers
intrusted to him, but that a body of men is often irresponsible. A mayor
is not likely to deliberately pursue a wrong course of action in defiance of
public opinion; but when a council is once allowed to meddle with the

APPENDIX. 53
executive department and to have control of the expenditure of money or
the making of appointments, defiance of public opinion on its part becomes
a frequent occurrence, and when election day comes there is generally
a complete failure to hold its members to any responsibility. Public
opinion is nearly always irresistible when justly aroused and concentrated
upon one man; but it is too apt to lose all of its force when it has to
expend itself upon a body of men supporting one another in wrong-doing.
" The mayor is just as much the servant of the people as is the humblest
member of a common council, and from the nature of his position is far
more subject to their control. The simpler the form of government is
made, the more hkely the people' are to understand and control it. The
responsibility of a mayor for executive work over which he is given full
control is something that can be made clear to the dullest voter ; the
responsibility of a councilman who has supported a job cannot often be so
easily fixed and understood. Under a proper charter a city should be
governed with some approach to the standard of efficiency attained by a
large private corporation in the management of its business ; but such
efficiency can only be reached by a system of government which secures '
the adoption of business principles. Spasmodic efforts to secure a busi
ness-like administration of city affairs through a citizen's movement at
election time must be of temporary benefit at best if the system of city
government is allowed to rest upon an utterly unbusiness-like basis. The
separation in politics of local affairs from those of the state or nation is
very rarely possible, but the municipal government can be placed upon
such a basis that whether administered by the candidate of a citizens' con
vention, or of one of the regular political parties, it will be hkely to be
conducted upon business principles.
" In view of the above considerations your committee in its draft of a
charter has given the mayor absolute power of appointing and removing
all of the municipal officers therein estabhshed, excepting only the mem
bers of the council, the members of the school committee, which consti
tutes a co-ordinate and independent branch of the executive department,
and chooses its own superintendent of schools, and the auditor of accounts
and comptroller, if any, the latter officers being chosen by the council to
act as a check upon the executive department. All of these municipal
officers are given the same absoliite power to appoint and remove the
subordinates in their respective departments.
"To compensate for the large powers given to the mayor, your com
mittee has imposed upon him large responsibiliries to the council and to
the public. The mayor and his administrarive oificers are required to be
present at all regular meetings of the council, and to give such information
as may be asked for as to the business of their respective offices; they are
given the right to speak upon all matters relating to their ofiices, but with
out the right to vote. They are also required to place upon public record
the reasons for every removal from office made by them. The mayor may
further be removed at any time by vote of two-thirds of all the members of
the council; this provision will certainly be likely to act as a check upon
any mayor who is inclined to abuse his powers, and as a sufficient safe-

54 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE.
guard and means of remedy in case such abuse ever actually takes place.
The term of office of the mayor has been left at one year, the customary
term in the cities of this Commonwealth, although it has been lengthened
in some large cities elsewhere to two years or more ; if a mayor is given
proper powers there seems to be no great objection to requiring him to
present himself to the people for re-election as often as once a year.
" The only officers besides the mayor who are to be elected by the people
according to the charter drafted are the members of the council and the
members of the school committee ; your committee believes that all other
officers properly constitute a part of the mayor's administration, and there
fore should be appointed by him. Members of the school committee are
left to be elected, as at present, two members each year to serve for a
period of three years.
" Your committee has given much consideration to the subject of the
city council. In accordance with the recommendation of the former report
above referred to, a single branch only has been established, instead of two
branches. The reasons urged in favor of two branches do not seem to be
of much weight in the case of cities, while they tend to confusion and divi
sion of responsibility. The single legislative body, which it is proposed
to call the council rather than the board of aldermen, is not an entirely
new departure, as it was adopted in the recent charter in the city of Walt-
tham in this State, and has also been in force in Brooklyn, where several
years of experience have been in its favor, as well as in other large cides.
In regard to the number of the council, there has been some difference of
opinion in your committee, and a minority favors a larger number of mem
bers than twenty-three, — the number settled upon.
"As to the manner of electing members of the council, your committee
has followed the recommendation of the former report, and submits a plan
for the election of eleven of the twenty-three members on a ticket at large,
and of the remaining twelve by districts.
" Much consideration has also been given by your committee to the
quesdon of adopting some form of minority representation, with the object
of securing in the council a proportional representation of the opinions
held by the voters ; by the present method of election a bare majority of
the voters can elect all of the members of what should be a representarive
body, giving no representation at all to the minority party. The plan of
cumulative voting, which is now in force in some elections in this country
as well as in England, was fully considered, and rejected as not entirely
satisfactory. While all the members of your committee admit the justice
and desirability of minority representation, three of them do not consider it
expedient to incorporate in the draft of the charter any plan for securing
it, and it is therefore reported without one ; while three other members,
beheving that the system known as the single transferable vote is a scien
tific and sadsfactory one, involving only difficulties in counting the ballots,
which may well be undergone for the sake of the advantages to be gained,
are in favor of incorporating in the charter a provision for such a system.
In case the adoption of any more elaborate system of minority representa
tion is not favored, it is suggested that the adoption of what is known as

APPENDIX. 55
the limited vote, — ^. g., allowing no one to vote for more than seven out of
the eleven councilmen at large, — would secure, with great simplicity, a
fairly just representadon of the minority party."
The eleventh section of the charter as proposed, being the second
section of the tide relating to the legislative department, read as
follows : -^
"Secdon ii. Each qualified voter shall be entided in all elections of
councilmen at large to cast as many votes as there are councilmen at
large to be elected, and in all elections of councilmen from wards to cast
as many votes as there are councilmen to be elected from his ward. The
persons receiving the highest number of votes shall be declared elected
councilmen at large and councilmen from wards respectively."
A series of public meetings were subsequently held, at which the
provisions of the proposed charter were debated at length. At two
of these, held on May 7th and 14th, the subject of minority repre
sentation was discussed in connection with the proposed section 11,
and a strong and earnest effort was made by the more enlightened
portion of those who took part in the discussion to have the principle
of minority representation incorporated in the instrument. The
chairman of the meeting, Mr. J. H. Slade, took the floor, making an
. earnest speech in advocacy of it j it was also advocated by Mr.
Quincy. The principal arguments against it were those usually
advanced against whatever is novel, in any way complicated, or but
partially understood. The opposition manifested was sufficiently
strong to show that the committee which prepared the charter was
correct in its conclusion that the time had not yet come for a system
of minority representation, in Quincy at least, and the issue was not
pressed. As a result of these discussions the charter was referred back for
amendment to the committee which reported it, and was subse
quently again reported in a new draft, through the columns of the
Patriot in its issue of November 26, 1887. The alterations made
in the original draft were not of a very material character j but, so
far as they went, especially in the direction of an increased ward
representation in the council and a decrease in the number of those
composing the council chosen at large, the changes distinctly failed
to improve the original draft. They tended in the direction of the
conventional city charter and in favor of the professional and ward
politician. The human, less wise than the animal, sheep insisted as
usual on being in the custody of the wolves.

56 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE.
A town-meeting was then called for Thursday, December ist, il
at which, after an animated discussion, the form of charter recom
mended was approved, and a committee appointed to secure its
passage by the Legislature. It became a law on the 17th of May
following; was accepted by the town by a vote of 812 in favor, to
454 against it, at a special town-meeting held on the nth of June;
and it went into operation on the 5th of January, 1889.

The Quincy charter has now been in operation for three years and
a half. It may be said generally that as the result of its working
the impression prevails that the composition of the council — the
legislative department — is the weak point in it. In that body there
has been a noticeable tendency towards the sacrifice of general to
local interests. Ward politics and requirements have been unduly
prominent. This it is claimed is due to the feature of local con
stituency in the charter, and to the want of any provision securing
minority representation. The students of municipal government
assert that the Quincy charter, as far as it went, was based on cor
rect principles; but that it failed to carry out those principles to
their necessary logical result. The analogy of the business corpora
tion should have been followed to its full extent, and all the members
of the legislative department should have been chosen at large, re
gardless of ward lines ; with, moreover, some provision for minority
representation. This result, it is argued, would have been brought
about to manifest advantage had the charter provided for the election
of a council to be composed of fifteen, or twenty-one, or twenty-four
members, as might be thought best, all to be chosen at large, while
no voter could vote for over two thirds of the entire number to be
chosen ; but, on the other hand, each voter should have been at
liberty to concentrate all, or any portion of the votes he could cast
on one or more candidates, or to distribute them among the full
number he was entitled to vote for, giving one vote to each. The
fifteen, twenty-one or twenty-four candidates who received in this way
the largest number of votes, irrespective of the size of the several
votes as compared with the whole or each other, would be elected,
and would compose the council.
Had such a system of electing the members of the legislative
department been made a part of the Quincy charter, it would, it is
contended, have assured an almost absolutely free constituency

APPENDIX. 57
Had those composing this total constituency, or any portion of them,
desired to secure ward or local representation, it would have been
easy for them to organize themselves so as, through concentration of
votes, to bring that result about. It was right that they should have
this power. If, on the other hand, scattered citizens wished to form
a constituency to bring about certain results, or choose to the council
particular men, it ought to be made easy for them so to do. It is now
difficult, if not impossible. Freedom for individual action was the
object to be kept in view and the result to be secured; and this
result cannot be attained through the political systems now in use.
It could be attained through changes in the basis of constituency
of the kind suggested.
As to matters of detail, and the innumerable possible complica
tions which the ingenuity of objectors always suggests, these, it is
argued, could safely be left to the constituency and the party man
agers to work out. If left alone, they would do this as the difficulties
arose, and in the easiest and most practical way. A great deal is now
heard about trusting the people ; but those who most freely make use
of this phrase are apt to show the least confidence in the ability of
any body of voters to work an experimental system into practical
shape by dealing with difficulties as they arise, and not before. It
would probably not require the experience of three elections to
familiarize both party managers and the great body of voters with
the theory and practice both of minority representation and cumula
tive voting. The more intelligent and independent class of voters
understand them already.
The future will decide, probably as the result of slow and painful
experience, whether the criticisms and arguments thus advanced are
entitled to consideration.
Meanwhile, it is in this connection worthy of notice that the last
charter granted, that for the city of Everett, approved June ii, 1892,
has provision, in one of the two bodies of which its legislative depart
ment is composed, for a certain degree of minority representation.
It is there provided that the board of aldermen " shall be composed
of six members, who shall be elected by and from the qualified voters
of the city," to serve for a term of two years, three aldermen to be
elected each year. ... In the election of aldermen " no voter shall
vote for more than two of the candidates for the three positions
respectively. If a voter marks more than two names for the three
positions to be so filled, his ballot shall not be counted for any of
such positions. ... In every municipal election . . . each voter

58 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE.
may vote for a number of aldermen, one less than the number
to be elected, and shall vote for no more ; and any ballot which
is marked for a greater number of names than as above provided
shall not be counted in the vote for aldermen." (Acts 1892, chap.
355, sect. 10.)
It will be observed that in this case, while no provision for cumu
lative voting is made, the candidates are at large, and a certain,
though limited, provision for minority representation is secured. It
is a step, although not a long step, in the direction of the larger
change of constituency above suggested.

The following extracts from a very interesting address on the
" Government of Cities," and the " Need of a Divorce of Municipal
Business from Politics," delivered by Mr. Moorfield Storey, at Buf
falo, N. Y., on September 30th, 1891, and printed in the New Eng
land Magazine for June, 1892 (New Series, vol. vi. pp. 432-441), have
a manifest bearing on the text : —
" Every city government is not as bad as that of New York, but every
where, with rare exceptions, inferior men are elected to municipal office,
and any man, however little his education or his previous training may
have fitted him for the work, is considered competent to deal with the
complicated problems of municipal government. A succession of men
more or less incompetent follow each other at brief intervals over the
stage, and as a result there is no consistent economical administration of
a city's business. Of Boston, a year ago, a gentleman who had been
studying the operation of the various departments said, ' The methods are
such that no business house could adopt them and keep out of bankruptcy
six months.'
" A third cause of our trouble may perhaps best be illustrated by a com
parison. A manufacturing corporation, whose stockholders include Re
publicans, Democrats, Prohibitionists, and Mugwumps, desires a president.
Those who are interested choose some man of acknowledged ability, and
without asking what his political opinions are, say to him : ' Become our
president, and we will pay you an adequate salary ; we will give you the
assistance of the best directors that we can select from our own members ;
you shall have power to manage our business as you think best, subject to
their advice, and if you succeed you shall keep the place as long as you
like.' The city seeking a mayor says to the same man: 'Do you wish to

APPENDIX. 59
become our mayor ? You must first agree to pay a large sum to the cam
paign fund for expenses. You must then satisfy the heads of certain
factions that they and their followers have something to gain by your
election ; and they are practical men, who are not to be satisfied with vague
expressions of good will, and will want something very definite. You must
then take the chances of a campaign in which all your sins and many
which you have never committed will be marshalled against you in the daily
papers, and you will be exposed to every kind of misrepresentation. If
you are elected, we shall give you very small pay, and a board of directors
who will be incompetent to help you, and entirely competent to embarrass
and perplex you at every turn. You will receive plenty of criticism from
every corrupt politician whose demands you either cannot or will not
gratify, but littie or no encouragement or support from good citizens, who
are too busy with their own affairs or too modest to give you much atten
tion or assistance or even applause, and who treat your good works as a
matter of course, while they are swift to visit on you, not only your own
sins, but the shortcomings of every city official ; and when your term is
over, and you are beginning to learn the duties of your office, we will remove
you in order to put some other unfortunate victim in your place.' Is it
surprising that the private corporation gets its president, and the city is
obhged to look elsewhere for its mayor?"

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