NEW HAMPSHIRE

And yet we have a thousand square miles of area more than Massachusetts, from which we were separated two hundred and fifty years ago. The new Royal Province of New Hampshire had then but four towns, which clung precariously to the seaboard; and, if the usual rule of computing population in proportion to qualified voters be observed, there were perhaps a thousand souls in the census.

In a quarter millennium we have now come to number about half a million people, and have spread from the coast to the lakes and beyond the mountains to the Canadian border.

The march has been toilsome. Subduing the forest was no easy task, and it is small wonder that so many of our acres, once cleared by the stern process of cutting and burning, have been permitted to resume their forest cover.

It is probable that Massachusetts was glad to be rid of us, back there two hundred and fifty years ago. We had not gotten on well with the royal governors who had lived in Boston. It was the first manifestation of a revolt against absentee landlordism, which New Hampshire has always more or less maintained.

When we were divorced from Massachusetts there arose, as often arises in such instances domestically, the question of the division of the property. "Our sovereign lord, the King, out of his princely grace," as the colonists themselves phrased it, had attended to this, and he fixed our boundary at a line running three miles north of the Merrimack River, thus accounting for the serpentine character of our southern frontier as well as for continuous heart-burnings ever since; for we have ever looked upon Lowell, Lawrence, and Haverhill as our lost ewe lambs-much, indeed, as the Montenegrins used to regard Spizza.

However, we should have thought ourselves lucky in that we escaped the more presumptuous claims set up in the name of the Worshipful John Endicott, Governor, who sent two surveyors to mark the extent of his jurisdiction, which he understood to extend to three miles beyond the headwaters of the Merrimack.

These worthies, one of whom, by the way, was John Sherman, ancestor of the statesman of that name, paused only when they had reached Lake Winnepesaukee, where they inscribed a bowlder with rude initials and the date, 1652, and returned home highly pleased with themselves, no…"