Cornfed Culture 245 



churches in colonial Massachusetts. The two ministers who 

 came out with the first supply of colonists to Salem prayed, 

 and then drew lots, to decide which one of them should serve 

 in the pulpit and which behind the schoolmaster's desk. Tui- 

 tion at those early schools was paid in corn. The Reverend 

 Francis Higginson of Salem, who drew the school and not the 

 meeting house, used to station a pupil at the schoolroom win- 

 dow to sell the surplus of corn to passers-by. When the plans 

 for Harvard College were going forward, every family in New 

 England was pledged to give one peck of corn, or twelve- 

 pence, or its value in wampum peag to the institution. 



Meanwhile Virginia evinced a happy disregard for educa- 

 tion. That choleric governor Sir William Berkeley exclaimed, 

 "Thank God there are no free schools or printing presses. I 

 hope we shall not have these for one hundred years." 



His hope was to go unfulfilled. Only thirty years later his 

 capital was selected as the site of the College of William and 

 Mary. Not that there was widespread enthusiasm over plans 

 for educating either the sons of the planters or the young 

 Indians. 



"You must not forget," Dr. Blair reminded Sir Edward 

 Seymour, "that people in Virginia have souls to save." 



"Souls," Sir Edward snorted. "Damn your souls! Grow 

 tobacco." 



Virginia did grow tobacco; but she also built her college 

 which started immediately a pattern in education very differ- 

 ent from that of Harvard, and later of Yale. William and Mary 

 was the first college in America to allow students to elect their 

 studies. In the English world it was the second college to have 

 a chair of Municipal Law. It was the first in America to teach 

 history and political science. The men who went out from it 

 carried the idea of a university which served the growing cul- 

 tural and social needs of a people. This idea was the germ from 

 which grew our state universities. 



The Virginians who ran over the mountain line into Ken- 

 tucky, and gathered eighty bushels of corn to the acre from 



