USA > New Hampshire > History of New Hampshire, Volume IV > Part 25
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the name of Gosport. The population gradually declined till in 1767 the number of residents was only two hundred and eighty- four. In the time of the Revolution the inhabitants were ordered to quit the island for safety. Most of them never returned. In 1775 only forty-four persons lived on the island. In the year 1800 the population was one hundred and twelve, as a town record of Gosport shows, "in a state of great poverty and wretchedness, such as to force the tear of commiseration and to draw from the humane every effort to afford relief." The old town of Gosport has been washed into the ocean. Massachusetts sent a company of soldiers to defend the island in 1690, and after their withdrawal the French made a raid upon it and carried away some of the shipping. There was once a small fort on Star Island, which was repaired in 1745 and mounted with nine four-pounders. The fort was dismantled and the guns were sent to Newburyport in the time of the Revolution.
Absentee landlords in Massachusetts came to own the busi- ness of the island and only fishermen, called "thirdsmen," made their abode there. These were of a rude and disorderly char- acter, as old court records prove. Within the last century the islands have become a place of summer resort, the popularity of which is increasing. The Unitarian Association has made them their place of annual meeting. Large hotels have been built. Small steamers run twice each day to and from Portsmouth. The breezes and the scenery are just as good as in olden times, and the smell of fish, hogs and goats, that once annoyed resi- dents, no longer lades the air. If isolation in the midst of good company, rest without hustling activity, and illimitable quantities of pure ocean air are desired, Star Island is the place to find them.
The two greatest attractions on earth are the ocean and the mountains. Nations have seated their divinities on mountain- tops. Especially those peaks that are covered much if not all of the time with dazzling snow are the places where Zeus and kindred divinities hold court. They are nearest to the sky and first reached when the gods come down to earth. Some fancy that our ascension to the sky can be effected best from such points of advantage. The aspiration of the soul draws the body with it. There is perpetual joy to one who lives with a broad
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outlook before him. Only a poor man will live down in a valley because he must, or because he is poorer in mind than in money. Some like to gaze at the ocean because it seems to be boundless and is ever changing in its visible aspects; others like the moun- tains better for wide extent of vision and permanent variety of scene. Usually those who have lived long by the sea seek the mountains for a change, while the mountaineers and inlanders fly to the ocean on sultry days. Those who go to New Hamp- shire sanatoria for change and rest sometimes find that the waiter gets the change and the landlord takes the rest, as the story goes. But New Englanders need not leave their customary habitations for change of climate and temperature. All varieties come to him that waits patiently at home. It is change of scenery and company that are most desired; not inactivity but work of another sort, that is called play. Often the play demands more strenuous exertion than the daily task, but it is recreation because we are under no compulsion to do it and we can stop when we want to. Most weary people need most of all rest to their souls rather than to their bodies. When the soul is rested, the body forgets its aches and pains. A vacation is for the pur- pose of sending the scapegoat heavily laden with sins and cares into the land of forgetfulness. We need often to get outside of ourselves, to leave the world of thought in which is our great- est life, and to get into the world of fact. We have a strange affinity with the beasts of the field and of the forest. Back to nature is the cry of the tired. Away with houses; let us live for a while out of doors. Lo, the poor Indian, is a wise man. He sleeps in a wigwam only when he is driven in by inclement weather, and he lives in the house of God that has only the sky for a roof.
The White Hills, or the Chrystal Hills, attracted the first settlers who came to New Hampshire. It was not merely the hope of discovering precious ores, but also the desire to find out what was beyond. Darby Field is credited with being the first white man who ascended what we now call Mount Washington, in 1642. Some have said 1632, but that is too early. He lived at Oyster River Point, in ancient Dover, now Durham. He be- came insane a few years later. Was it because of unfulfilled desire? Having once looked out from the top of Mount Wash-
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ington, could he no longer be contented elsewhere? P. T. Bar- num said it was "the next greatest show on earth," and most people who go there re-echo his remark. They all know one place still better, or they are seeking for it. Tourists have been going to Mount Washington for over a century, and the stream of visitors grows greater every year. The winding carriage road opened in 1861 and the tiptop house were a wonder over fifty years ago, and when the railroad was built up Jacob's Ladder in 1869, nobody was perfectly contented till he had ascended into the heavens. To be above the clouds and then to see those clouds roll away like the billows of ocean and disclose a hundred miles of landscape even to the Atlantic is worth-all that the industry will bear. A spacious hotel fastened to earth has taken the place of the tip-top house. Everybody wants to go there and nobody stays long except the men employed in the United States Signal Station. At any stage in life we look around for a few moments and want to pass on. The place is not near enough to Heaven after all our effort to get there.
Good automobile roads wind through the valleys of the White Hills, and where the natural scenery is best hotels have sprung up as by magic. The Notch has been a place of resort ever since its discovery by Timothy Nash and Benjamin Saw- yer in 1771, although they found that an old Indian trail led through it. It was not long before a carriage road was built through the Notch to let Coos county out to market, at Ports- mouth or Portland. The Notch is a narrow defile two miles in length with precipitous rocks on both sides. The head waters of the Saco river flow through it; so does the produce of the West now over the rails of the Portland and Ogdensburg. Half a mile from the entrance to the Notch is the Silver Cascade and a little further southeast is the Flume, where the Saco falls two hundred and fifty feet over three precipices; but all this must be left for the exclusive use of poets.
The first public house built in the Notch was occupied by Samuel Willey in 1825. He was of the fifth generation from Thomas Willey, who was next neighbor to Darby Field at Oys- ter River Point. He and all his family perished in the landslide of August 28, 1826, nine victims in all. Frightened by the roar of the avalanche they fled from their house and were swept into
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the river, where some of their mangled bodies were found. The house remained uninjured. The pathetic story has been told many times in prose and verse.
A Captain Rosebrook opened a house for summer visitors in the Notch, in 1808, near the base of Mount Washington. Ethan A. Crawford succeeded him in 1817, cut a footpath to the top of the mountain and built a stone cabin, where adventurous climbers might lodge for a night. Beds of moss, blankets and a stove were the furniture. The long residence of the Crawford family in this vicinity gave the name to Crawford Notch.
Bethlehem is soon reached after passing through the Notch, where thirty hotels along two miles of well built road attract yearly about three thousand visitors. The atmosphere and the scenery are as sure a cure for hay fever as can anywhere be found. The view of the Presidential Range when covered with snow and polished with sunlight is one not easily forgotten. In sailing from Thessalonica to the Piraeus it was once my privilege to see Olympus white with the snows of March, and I have gazed at the Jungfrau at the distance of Interlaken, when winter had not left its summit, but the Presidential Range in April was more impressive for its beauty and grandeur, and the names of its peaks brought historic characters to mind, as inspiring as any of the mythical personages that made trouble at the court of Zeus. From Bethlehem also may be seen to good advantage the valley of the Ammonoosuc. A good carriage road through the Fran- conia Notch leads to North Woodstock, that has become a favorite summer resort.
One who has sailed across Lake Winnipisaukee (as it is now spelled) is inclined to accept the version of its Indian name that makes it "the Smile of the Great Spirit." He needs not to go to the lakes of Killarney to find natural beauty. Lakes Como and Luzerne have loftier mountains round about them, but the view is not so broad, nor is there so much variety. No wonder that its shores and islands have become places of summer resi- dence. It would be impossible to compare one lake with an- other, one mountain with another, and determine which is the more beautiful. Tastes and moods differ, and each person reads into the object seen the thoughts and longings of his soul. One person can see beauty where all is commonplace and dull to
"THREE LAKES FROM SANGUINARI" AT "THE BALSAMS," DIXVILLE NOTCH. 1914
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A HISTORY
another. Most persons have to be taught to see beauty, gran- deur, sublimity, majesty, and to read the meanings of moun- tains, lakes, waterfalls and forests. It is an important part of education that has been sadly neglected in schools, and happy and better is he who has been brought up from childhood in the midst of natural scenery that stamps some of its character upon the unfolding spirit. We all know the story of the Great Stone Face, as told by Hawthorne. Almost anywhere in New Hampshire one may daily look upon scenes that tend to enoble the mind, to stir up great ambitions, that teach lessons of rever- ance and devotion to high ideals. If a summer vacation here does not make the visitor a better and happier person, it is be- cause he is a hopeless dyspeptic or a confirmed sinner.
There are hundreds of other lakes, smaller but still beautiful. Each has its summer cottages. There are scores of grand moun- tains, like Monadnock, Chocorua, Kearsage and Moosilaukee, whose towering forms invite the gaze and detain the onlooker. There are many hill-towns, like Peterborough, Francestown, Hopkinton, Boscawen, whose old mansions are opened in the summer to receive guests for the season. It is estimated that there are two thousand inns, great and small, during the vacation time in New Hampshire, and that the business of entertaining visitors, not reckoning the city cousins, employs $10,000,000 of capital.
A few years ago Governor Rollins gave an impetus to the movement of celebrating Old Home Week. Then followed a systematic advertising of farms for sale. Abandoned farms are now a myth. The owners want a good price before they will give up an acre of rocky land, and they are quite right. Yet nearly one thousand farms have been bought by wealthy persons outside of New Hampshire for summer homes. Large sums of money have been expended, and Governor Wentworth's farm at Wolfeborough is quite outdone by modern plutocrats. The sale of such farms has brought two million dollars into the State, and that means the expenditure of much more. Well can New Hampshire afford to build roads for automobiles and tax the automobiles to keep up the roads. The late Austin Corbin bought farm after farm till he had twenty-five thousand acres, at a price varying from one dollar to twenty-five dollars an
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acre. Twenty-seven miles of wire fence surround it. Within may be seen herds of buffalo, moose, deer, bison and wild boar. From twenty-five to fifty keepers are employed according to the season. But is all this as good as to have the three hundred and seventy-five independent owners of those acres, who once lived there? Must the rich own the country as well as the city and reduce the independent farmers to wage-earners and tenants? New Hampshire needs practical farmers more than she needs wealthy summer residents. There is room enough, however, for both at present, and probably it will be so for a long time. So to all the world New Hampshire says, "Come and visit us and stay as long as you can."
DIXVILLE NOTCH
Chapter XVII THE NEW HAMPSHIRE OF THE FUTURE
Chapter XVII
THE NEW HAMPSHIRE OF THE FUTURE
T HE saying is often repeated, that coming events cast their shadows before. Is it not truer that past events cast their shadows into the future? History repeats itself with a dif- ference. On the first page of this work the statement was made that history is the hand-maid of prophecy. A review of the leading events of the nearly three centuries that have passed since New Hampshire was first settled, in connection with the history of the United States and other nations, should enable one to forecast the future to some extent. It is not claimed that thus we arrive in advance at certainties, but possibilities and probabilities are seen through the mists, and they are of such importance that wisdom prepares for them. The poet Lowell makes one of his quaint characters to say, "Never don't prophesy, unless you know." That rule prohibits all prediction. It is sometimes helpful to utter our hopes and fears. If we see the past and the present as they really are, we may foresee somewhat their logical consequences, for the same forces will be working among men about like ourselves and our forebears. Even a cloud as big as a man's hand may foretell abundance of rain.
For half a century a small but ever increasing company of women in the state and in the nation have been trying to open the eyes of the men to see a self-evident truth, that political rights and privileges should not be determined by sex. It took longer to obliterate the color line, and it is not yet entirely rubbed out in large portions of the nation. Those who have exclusive privileges, obtained by force or fraud, are slow to share them with any others. An unlimited monarchy, an oli- garchy, an aristocracy, do not concede political rights to the many, till they are obliged to do so. The spread of education leads the masses to know and demand their rights, and when the claimants are numerous and powerful enough, they get pos-
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session of what has always belonged to them. The conviction is growing fast that educated women have the same right as educated men to vote and to hold political office, and that ignorant men and women should be kept away from the ballot- box. No matter how many men and how many women in New Hampshire are now opposed to equal suffrage, anyone who can see as far as the Western and Pacific states discerns the cloud moving eastward. It threatens to become a cyclone to those who oppose its onward movement. All political parties are afraid to openly resist it. Public sentiment has been educated to the point of demanding equal political rights for men and women. The conservative East, made more conservative on this subject by the influx of uneducated foreigners, must surely yield to the more progressive West. If certain eastern states will not of their own accord grant to those women who want it the right to vote, then an amendment to the national consti- tution will sweep their opposition away. For thousands of years women have been the servants of men, simply because the men were physically stronger. In heathen lands and in some parts of half-civilized Europe and America they still bear the heavy burdens and perform hard manual labor. Gradually the age of chivalry is returning with a new order of Knights. Education was once for men and for only a favored few of them. Now education is acknowledged to be the right of all. Con- sider the colleges for young women, how they grow like the lilies. They are prophetic of a new order of government, when political bosses shall not determine elections. It is safe to predict that within a few years-few is a sufficiently elastic word-the women of New Hampshire will be voting for good government and filling many of the political offices.
Another movement that has been gaining in strength and speed for many years and that will be accelerated by the votes of women is the legal prohibition of the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors. The wave of enlightened sentiment on this subject also is moving from West to East, from new settle- ments to old. National prohibition is in the air. We shall soon have a prohibitory law that will prohibit in Maine, New Hamp- shire and Vermont. The reluctant states will be forced to fall into line. The people who come to us from abroad, educated
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and habituated to the use of some kinds of alcoholic beverages, learn in one generation the evils of intemperance. The saloon must go and the tippler must cease. Science has put the ban upon all intoxicants as habitual beverages. Education in the schools and by the press will uproot the monstrous evil. Twenty years is too long a time to wait for this. Many will think it madness or foolhardiness to foretell in so brief a time the downfall of a persistent habit and a lucrative traffic that have existed from the beginning of history. Let such consider the sudden prohibition of intoxicants in Russia, the abolition of human slavery after ages of oppression, the revolutions in government by uprisings of the people, and the rapid changes in modern thought. Humanitarianism and altruism are watch- words of the present. What ought to be, for the welfare of men at large, must be. Let the need of a reform be broadly known, and the evil is doomed. Government by the people must be for the people. Rpublics will not vote against the interests of the masses and for the enriching of a few, after their eyes have been opened. The knell of the liquor traffic is sounding in our ears.
Notice the changes that will immediately follow a radical temperance reformation throughout the nation. The saloon will no longer dominate in political life. Hitherto the brewers and distillers with their subordinate agents have held the political balance of power. They have been able to control votes enough to turn the elections to that party that promised most to them. Thus legislation has been corrupted, and the will of the people, even as expressed in law, has been nullified. Because the prohibitory law has not been properly enforced, and officials have yielded to local preference and hush money, ardent advocates of temperance and total abstinence have voted for license in preference to a prohibitory law unenforced. A no- license town that borders on a licensed town or city gets rid of the saloon but sends its thirsty citizens across the border; a prohibition state, that borders upon states where intoxicating liquors can be purchased, gets rid of open saloons in the coun- try and small villages and has saloons more or less secret in the cities, while private citizens import all the liquor they want in original packages. National prohibition of the manufacture,
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transportation and sale of intoxicating beverages is needed to effect a complete and lasting cure of the age-long curse. Such a remedy is on its way and will arrive soon. The fight made by intrenched capital will be stubborn, but all signs indicate that right is soon to win. The gain in the improvement of politics alone will be worth all that the reform has cost.
Another consequence of state and national prohibition en- forced will be a sudden, enormous and joyful decrease of poverty and crime. The jails and almshouses will have few tenants. Courts and lawyers will grow beautifully less. Not so many policemen will be needed. Every community will feel safer. Divorces, that now disgrace our civilization, will be diminished by half. The public health will be greatly improved. Labor will be more constant and efficient. There will be fewer deserted families, and orphanages to a considerable extent may be supplanted by homes. The ranks of the feeble-minded will be gradually thinned, while the pitiable and helpless products of the saloon in the past will be segregated and hindered from propagating their kind. We are now combating a basal law of nature and are providing for the survial of the unfit. Deaf- mutes, the crippled, the blind, the feeble-minded, the inebriates, the criminals have been housed and fed and allowed to have offspring, while the industrious poor and their children are left to shift for themselves. States are slowly learning to segregate by sexes those who are unfit to repeople the earth.
When women have equal rights with men and the saloon has lost its influence in politics by ceasing to be, it is not very hazardous to predict that New Hampshire will have a House of Representatives one-fourth as large as it now is and four times as efficient. Every town now wants its representative, and the office must be passed around among many aspirants, without much regard to pre-eminent qualifications for the office. The average representative gets two hundred dollars for a session, has an outing without neglect of business, attends the daily sessions with more or less regularity, takes little part in the discussions through inability or indifference, skims his free newspaper and chats with his neighbors. He has a social good time and enjoys his temporary prominence. Not one out of ten is qualified to be a law-maker. In many discussions only a few
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know the principles and facts involved. There can not be ideal legislation till there are ideal legislators, the selected few, who have natural and acquired abilities to discern what is wisest and best for the government of the State. In the good time coming every member of the general court will be an indepen- dent student and thinker, unselfishly seeking the greatest good to the greatest number, with justice and equal rights to all. If one should be able to read and write in order to vote, how much more should one know to be qualified to make laws for the whole people? Laws must be found out before they can be applied to conduct. The person who knows nothing about fundamental laws in the material, industrial, social, political, moral and intellectual worlds, can not in reality represent a community.
The wise legislators of the new New Hampshire will insti- tute a reform in legal procedure, so that the poor may be able "to obtain right and justice freely, without being obliged to purchase it; completely and without any denial; promptly and without delay ; conformably to the laws." Such was the vision of those who formed the first constitution of the State. Do the poor now get justice without purchasing it? Are not the costs of legal procedure so great that citizens of moderate means prefer to lose what is justly their due rather than to spend much more in trying to obtain it? What chance in court has the poor man against the rich? How many rich law-breakers get their deserts? The poor and ignorant are at the mercy of the rich and the sharpers. Good government should protect the weak, educate the ignorant and lift the poor out of their poverty. In the long past and up to the present in some countries the aim of government and religious organizations has been to keep the masses of toilers ignorant and poor. Thus they can not en- danger the wealth and power of the ruling few. To overthrow that regime and to bring the toilers into possession of what rightfully belongs to them is the aim of modern revolutions, socialistic organizations, political reform parties and labor unions.
Reforms in politics progress by means of combinations of voters who force one of the old political parties and then the other to make concession after concession. The Progressives
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melt back into the old parties after their main principles have been adopted, only to reappear as a decisive factor in elections, when new issues arise and further reforms are needed. The greatest of all issues now is involved in the relation of labor to capital. The toilers are demanding higher wages, their proper share of products of combined industry, fewer hours of labor, adequate protection of life and health, better housing, steady opportunity to work, compensation in cases of accident, old age pensions, help for widows and orphans, abolition of child labor and education for all. The justice of their demands-no longer requests and pleadings-is gaining recognition. How the de- sired ends may be secured is the question which will absorb public interest as never before, when the excitement of world- war shall have ceased.
In the multitude of conflicting opinions the line is being drawn between those who favor and those who oppose the ownership by the people of all public utilities, or natural mon- opolies, such as the water works and the lighting of cities, the means of transportation by trolleys, railroads and canals, the waterfalls, mines and forests. What is equivalent in its prac- tical working to the public ownership of all lands by the imposi- tion of the single tax on land alone is under widening considera- tion. The public ownership of the larger manufactories is advo- cated by a smaller number. Some of the advocated reforms have begun. Many municipalities own their own water works, gas and electric plants and trolleys. Why should not the state or the nation own the railroads ?. Such is the case among Euro- pean nations. Some of the higher institutions of learning, built and managed by capitalists, advocate private ownership and seek to show that national ownership in other lands is a com- parative failure. Their opponents so arrange statistics and figures as to prove that national ownership is superior to the plan now in operation in the United States. We have no wish to argue here for or against either system, but simply to show the trend of public opinion. No one can doubt, who reads the journals, that the advocates of national ownership of railroads are gaining ground. The threatened strikes and the receiver- ships are pointing that way as a practical solution of increasing difficulties and fears. The failures and the looting of railroads,
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