376 Percy Wells Bidwell 



recklessness. Those days are passed and shame throws its thick 

 mantle over them. "^ 



Tendencies Toward Social Degeneration. 



An isolated conmaunity always tends toward social degeneration, 

 and the drunkenness, rowdyism, and general coarseness of manners of 

 the inland towns at this time were but premonitions of the more 

 disastrous results which might be expected from economic and social 

 stagnation. At no time in these communities was there a distinct 

 criminal class, of the type now technically known as degenerate; but 

 petty crimes, stealing, assaults and disturbances were of frequent 

 occurrence.2 There are many indications that the influence of the 

 church was decadent. Up to the beginning of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury, the ecclesiastical organization had secured, by means of a 

 censorship of the private life of its members so inquisitorial as to 

 seem nowadays intolerable, fairly submissive adherence to a rigid 

 code of morality. With the decline in the authority of the church 

 in matters of doctrine came also a weakening in its control over the 

 conduct of its adherents.^ 



Another cause of laxity in morals, of probably greater importance, 

 was the general spirit of lawlessness spreading over the country 

 after the Revolution, which seems especially to have affected the 

 country districts. The soldiers returning from the war found it hard 

 to settle down and get their living honestly in the previous humdrum 

 routine. They brought back with them new and often vicious 

 habits which the rest of the community imitated. Then, in the inter- 

 val between the overturn of the regularly constituted colonial authori- 



* Fiftieth Anniversary of the Ordination and Settlement of Richard S. Storrs, 

 D.D., Pastor of the First Congregational Church in Braintree, Mass. July 3, 1861. 

 Boston, 1861. pp. 32-33. 



* The records of the town courts, where accessible, are a rich source of evidence 

 on this point. See Wood, Sumner Gilbert. The Taverns and Turnpikes of Old 

 Blanford, pp. 188-205. 



' Dwight, Travels, IV. 380, writes: "Crimes, to a considerable extent are now 

 practised, avowed, and vindicated, are made the materials of a jest, and gloried 

 in as proofs of ingenuity and independence, which our ancestors knew only by 

 report, and of which they spoke only with horror. Inferior deviations from recti- 

 tude are become extensively familiar, and regarded as things of course." The 

 cause which the writer ascribes for this state of things is the growing spirit of 

 infidelity. He adds: "From these and other causes, we have lost that prompt 

 energy in behaK of what is right, and that vigorous hostiUty to what is wrong, 

 ■which were so honourable traits in the character of those who have gone before 

 us." (p. 381). 



