Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/162

 chorus of protest comes down to us as evidence in support of this view. It may not be unprofitable therefore to reëxamine our subject from the new angle thus suggested.

Not all the voices in that chorus were those of the actual sufferers. Many highly pertinent observations on the matter were made by the conscript fathers themselves, and even by the outside public. Hardly had the system got well under way before the Overseers discovered that the food was not worth the price asked, low as that was, and suggested that “the scholars charges might be less, or their Commons better.’’ This seems to have been the favorite way of putting the case during the seventeenth century. The conditions in the hall must have been notorious, for in 1681 Mr. Samuel Ward of Charlestown, not an alumnus at all, left to the College by will the island in Boston Harbor known as Bumpkin Island, “the rent of it to be for the easement of the charges of the dyet of the students that are in Commons.” In 1653 the whole institution was in a parlous state, and the General Court ordered an investigation, especially “‘to direct some way how the necessary officers, as steward, butler, and cooke, may be provided for, so that the schollers comons may not be so short as they now are occasioned thereby.”