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The Old South Meeting-House is not to be passed without mention. It is among the most aged survivals of pre-revolutionary days. Neither its architecture not its age, however, is its chief warrant for our notice. The absurd number of windows in this battered old structure is what strikes the passer-by.
No close research into pre-Revolutionary currents and movements is necessary to understand that the Revolution was brought about by the dissatisfied trading class as the only means of securing absolute freedom of trade.
One does not find in his letters the bitter references to democracy and to the populace which can be discovered in the writings of so many of his party friends, legacies of pre-revolutionary ideas inflamed by hatred of Parisian mobs.
He was the overseas apostle of Bourbon paternalism, and as his commission authorized him to 'order all things as he may think just and proper, the intendant never found much opportunity for idleness. Tocqueville, shrewdest among historians of pre-revolutionary France, has somewhere pointed out that under the old regime the administration took the place of Providence.
They retire at night into their dens, where they live on black bread, water and roots. They spare other human beings the trouble of sowing." In pre-revolutionary France, the clergy, counting monks and nuns, numbered, in 1762, over 400,000, with total possessions estimated at two thousand million pounds, producing an annual revenue of about one hundred and forty millions.
Captious critics, including those who wrote for the daily press and those who merely sent in offensive letters college professors and such like cheap high-brows had raised yawping voices to point out that Paul Revere galloping along the pre-Revolutionary turnpike to spread the alarm passed en route two garages and one electric power house; that Washington crossing the Delaware stood in the bow of his skiff half shrouded in an American flag bearing forty-eight stars upon its field of blue; that Andrew Jackson's riflemen filing out from New Orleans to take station behind their cotton-bale breastworks marched for some distance beneath a network of trolley wires; that Abraham Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation did so while seated at a desk in a room which contained in addition to Lincoln and the desk and the Proclamation a typewriter and a Persian rug; that at Manila Bay Admiral Dewey wore spats and a wrist watch.
A pre-revolutionary magnate, the representative of a famous old Salem family, had here built himself a pleasure house, on a scale of magnificence, which, combined with its airy site and difficult approach, obtained for it and for the entire hill on which it stood, the traditionary title of "Browne's Folly." Whether a folly or no, the house was certainly an unfortunate one.
With the country folk of the pre-revolutionary era, the faultfinding and dispute related always to political questions proper to questions of rights as between the king and his subjects; to questions of institutional forms, the best method of governing, etc.
Architecturally the restoration of the second floor is less happy than that of the first. It is not in the spirit of the work below; nor does it accord with typical Colonial work of pre-Revolutionary days. It lacks that simple, straight-forward dignity of design; that fine sense of proportion; that refinement and appropriateness of detail.
Here the thoughtless throng looking through the iron railing may see the old weather-beaten and time-eaten slabs with their curious lettering which designate the spots where many of the men of the pre-revolutionary epoch were laid to their last repose. The word cemetery is from Greek and means the little place where I lie down.
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