By the year 1634 the scheme of the Massachusetts Company had so far prospered that nearly 4000 Englishmen had come over, and some twenty villages on or near the shores of the bay had been founded.  The building of permanent houses, roads, fences, and bridges had begun to go on quite briskly; farms were beginning to yield a return for the labour of the husbandman; lumber, furs, and salted fish were beginning to be sent to England in exchange for manufactured articles; 4000 goats and 1500 head of cattle grazed in the pastures, and swine innumerable rooted in the clearings and helped to make ready the land for the ploughman.  Political meetings were held, justice was administered by magistrates after old English precedents, and church services were performed by a score of clergymen, nearly all graduates of Cambridge, though one or two had their degrees from Oxford, and nearly all of whom had held livings in the Church of England.  The most distinguished of these clergymen, John Cotton, in his younger days a Fellow and Tutor of Emmanuel College, had for more than twenty years been rector of St. Botolph’s, when he left the most magnificent parish church in England to hold service in the first rude meeting-house of the new Boston.  From Emmanuel College came also Thomas Hooker and John Harvard.  Besides these clergymen, so many of the leading persons concerned in the emigration were university men that it was not long before a university began to seem indispensable to the colony.  In 1636 the General Court appropriated L400 toward the establishment of a college at Newtown.  In 1638 John Harvard, dying childless, bequeathed his library and the half of his estate to the new college, which the Court forthwith ordered to be called by his name; while in honour of the mother university the name of the town was changed to Cambridge.

[Illustration:  Founding of Harvard College]

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