Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/31

Rh Stark, who bore a commission from New Hampshire. All through the War of Independence New Hampshire's contingent to the army was liberal. When the war closed New Hampshire men returned to the duties of clearing farms, building schoolhouses, and worshiping God. Dartmouth College was founded in 1789; and soon the little red schoolhouses marked the cross-roads newly surveyed. There was a high average attendance at these district schools during the winter months and learning was prized in every home. Thus were men living, acting, and feeling in the early years of the nineteenth century in this particular community. Religion, schooling, politics, and every man his own master, the owner of his own land, made that early American life a throbbing, vital experience.

Men who counted in these communities could not be ignorant and unsocial. They were robust from contending with nature and savages, intensely patriotic and versed in statescraft, as they had but recently been evolving a constitution for the new world; religious, for they were reestablishing a church of Christ, suiting it to democracy where each man must meet God for himself; scholarly they were, too, in a large sense, for they read the best books of England and studied the journals of the day, jealously watching the Old World, that the New World of their dreams might not be found wanting in intellectual progress. These men founded colleges.

For six generations the Bakers had been in New England. Their history is exactly the history of the