272 History of Universities
in the form of land that yielded rent. Harvard College of
necessity plowed her original £400 from the colony, as well
as John Harvard’s benefaction, into the first college building.
And before that building was completed, the great depression
of 1641 set in owing to the stoppage of immigration by the
English Civil War. Governor Winthrop, recording this first
slump in the stock market, wrote that a cow worth £20 in
the spring of 1640 fetched but £8 in December, and £4 in
June; the Puritan fathers were face to face with the now
much advertised Economics of Abundance, and there was a
mighty cow slaughter, for which the cattle owners were not
paid. As a Harvard wit verified in an early Almanac :
. . . since the mighty Cow her Crown hath lost,
In every place she’s made to rule the roast.
Where to get the wherewithal to run the College? The
students paid their fees in grain, meat, and every kind of
farm produce and shop goods; but there were limits to what
the college steward could work off. The Colony, following
a European precedent, granted the College the revenue of
a ferry which was the shortest way from Boston to Cam-
bridge; but unfortunately the ferry tolls were paid in wam-
pum, the only fractional currency that New England used.
President Dunster complained that all the counterfeit wam-
pum, stones and dyed shells, that the Indians worked off on
their customers, returned to the College in ferry toll. A
modern college treasurer, ruefully contemplating handsomely
engraved certificates issued by Samuel Insull and Ivor
Krueger, may sympathize with President Dunster three cen-
turies ago, picking over several hundred yards of wampum
in the hope of salvaging a few fathoms of genuine shell.
The next financial expedient that Harvard tried was an
endowment drive in England, conducted by two Overseers of
the College. But the English Puritans were busy waging a