made to realize that republican government is in New England a product of the soil and not an exotic,--in France it is a graft; with us it is the stem. The growth of this germ from the town-meeting to the General Court, from the General Court to the Continental Congress, and from that to the Government of the United States, and thence back to the great cardinal fact of force,--all this is for others to trace. Meanwhile, here to-day, we stand on a record of two hundred and fifty years of pure democracy,--the deep, underlying tap-root of whatever is good in America. And indeed that record relates not to great things. It tells us of the daily life of our fathers. It deals not with theories, but with practical issues. The earlier generations did not realize that they were evolving a system, when they made regulations for the preservation of the town timber and the use of its common grounds; to check the roving propensities of its hogs, and to prescribe the liberty of the rams or the number of the parish bulls. Yet such was the fact, and the whole developed system of our National Government of to-day may be read in little in the Weymouth town records of over a century past. To-day’s jealousy of the foreign producer is there evinced towards those inhabiting the neighboring towns,--they must not partake of the privileges of Weymouth. The protective system began with the beginning. In the earlier days bounties are offered for the ears of wolves, but later, as the wilderness is subdued, these are dropped from the record and the crow and the blackbird are proscribed in their place. Now and again we find the town entering on some system of encouragement to a new branch of industry, making a grant of land therefor;[76] but the herring fishery and the passage of the alewives into Great Pond have left, perhaps, the deepest mark on the town records. The annual passage of the fish up the Back River was an event in the life of Weymouth, exciting the liveliest interest in old and young. For this really great boon the town was indebted to Adam Cushing, one of its prominent citizens in the provincial times. Mr. Cushing died in the year of the great sickness, 1751, and seems to have been a truly remarkable man. About 1730 he bethought himself of bringing some herring, during the spawning season, over from Taunton River to the Great Pond. He did so, himself superintending the work of transportation, and seeing to it that fresh water was properly supplied to the fish. It would seem, therefore, that through him Weymouth may claim a place of one hundred and forty years’ standing in the interesting history of pisciculture in Massachusetts.[77]