“It is now the fashion to place the golden age in times when noblemen were destitute of comforts the want of which would be intolerable to a modern footman; when farmers and shopkeepers breakfasted on loaves the very sight of which would raise a riot in a modern work-house; when to have a clean shirt once a week was a privilege reserved for the higher class of gentry; when men died faster in the purest country air than they now die in the most pestilential lanes of our towns, and when men died faster in the lanes of our towns than they now die on the coast of Guiana.... There is scarcely a page of the history or lighter literature of the seventeenth century which does not contain some proof that our ancestors were less human than their posterity. The discipline of work-shops, of schools, of private families, though not more efficient than at present, was infinitely harsher. Masters, well born and bred, were in the habit of beating their servants. Pedagogues knew of no way of imparting knowledge but by beating their pupils. Husbands, of decent station, were not afraid to beat their wives.... The more carefully we examine the history of the past, the more reason shall we find to dissent from those who imagine that our age has been fruitful of new social evils. The truth is that the evils are, with scarcely an exception, old. That which is new is the intelligence which discerns, and the humanity which remedies them.” FOOTNOTES: [100] Savage’s _Winthrop_, v. 1, p. 194, n. [101] Concerning this curious and very interesting map, see _Proceedings Mass. Hist. Soc._ (Second Series), v. 1, pp. 211-214. There is a reproduction of the map in the large-paper edition of Winsor’s _Narrative and Critical History of America_, v. 3, p. 380, with a descriptive note relating thereto.