History of Norfolk County, Massachusetts, with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men . s there is vice and of course does not follow that in communitieswhere there is no intemperance crime is experience of all ages and many countries dem-onstrates the falsity of this proposition ; but none theless the other proposition is true. In New Englandthe enforced industry, the religious training, and thelaw-abiding habits of the people during the colonialperiod modified to some extent the evils of intemper-ance. The New Englander was neither an Irishmannor
History of Norfolk County, Massachusetts, with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men . s there is vice and of course does not follow that in communitieswhere there is no intemperance crime is experience of all ages and many countries dem-onstrates the falsity of this proposition ; but none theless the other proposition is true. In New Englandthe enforced industry, the religious training, and thelaw-abiding habits of the people during the colonialperiod modified to some extent the evils of intemper-ance. The New Englander was neither an Irishmannor an Indian ; and so he did not in his cups becomefighting drunk like the first, or sodden drunk like thelast. The habits and traditions and inground train-ing of a race assert themselves even through , a Donnybrook fair was in Yankee in-ebriety as unknown a feature as a Mohawk they were sober the people were not quarrel-some or lawless or shiftless; and consequently whenthey were drunk they did not as a rule fight or ravishor murder. But that the earlier generations in Mas-. QUINCY. 321 sachusetts were either more law-abiding, or more self-restrained than the latter, is a proposition whichaccords neither with tradition nor with the reason ofthings. The habits of those days were simpler thanthose of the present; they were also essentially community was small ; and it hardly needs to besaid that where the eyes of all are upon each, thegeneral scrutiny is a safeguard to morals. It is incities, not in villages, that laxity is to be looked course, it hardly needs to be said that in oldBraintree and early Quincy the thought of robbery orviolence scarcely entered into the heads of the did not require bolts to their doors nor bars totheir windows ; neither, under similar circumstances,do they require them to-day. On the other hand,now and again, especially in the relations between thesexes, we get glimpses of incidents in
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