the Massachusetts public service companies. The concern was not highly profitable. The wooden pipes soon had to be replaced by iron ones, at considerable expense. Customers were not very numerous: at its best the company supplied some fifteen hundred houses. For the first ten years no dividends were paid, and for the next thirty they averaged under four per cent. Eventually, in the late forties, the property was sold to the town of Boston for $44,000.

The Manhattan Company (1799) was, as we have seen, formed ostensibly and incorporated primarily to furnish New York City with a satisfactory water supply. Its charter was to be void unless it should accomplish this object within two years. The company still operates under its charter, hence it may be presumed to have served the purpose intended. It contemplated bringing water from the Bronx River, but actually did no more than build a pump near the "Collect pond" and distribute water in the usual wooden pipes from there or a well at Cross and Duane streets to the lower part of the town. It need hardly be said that no large part of its $2,000,000 capital was thus employed, and in spite of its efforts New York was far from enjoying a satisfactory abundant water supply.1

A few facts regarding smaller companies may be briefly presented. The first Massachusetts corporation, chartered two days before the Boston company, was named The Proprietors of the water-works in the middle of the town of Pittsfield. It contracted in April, 1795, for laying the aqueducts, and this was probably done. In 1803 the company advertised for a person to repair the works and keep them in repair for a fixed sum paid annually by each member. In the following year the company had become so disorganized that the regular meeting was not held.2 A project for the Salem and Danvers aqueduct was promoted in 1796, incorporation secured in the spring of 1797, a reservoir completed on Gallows Hill in 1798, and water supplied through three-inch sapling pipes in the spring of 1799. A capital of some $60,000 is said to have been raised. The com

1 Cf. Memorial History of New York, iii. 344, 394-395. 2 J. E. A. Smith, The History of Pittsfield .

...

(Springfield, 1876), ii, 258.

pany lived long, introducing improvements and maintaining its monopoly with considerable success. In 1848 the price of shares in the company was $4 for each family of three, and fifty cents for each additional person, annually.' In 1796 Joshua Thomas organized an association to bring water from the Town Brook near Deep Water Bridge in Plymouth, a charter was secured in February, 1797, and the company continued to supply the inhabitants till 1855.2 The Proprietors of the Portsmouth Aqueduct were incorporated in December, 1797, with a view to bringing water from a spring about three miles from the courthouse. Pipes were laid first in 1799, and by 1800 some two hundred and fourteen houses and stores were supplied with abundant water of excellent quality. The Morris Aqueduct Association in Morristown, N. J., was organized in February, 1799, chartered in November, and completed its works about the same time. A similar company incorporated for Newark in 1800 accomplished its object. Both had long and modestly successful careers. New London Aqueduct company was chartered in May, 1800, with a capital of $400, increased two years later to $20,000. It contracted to supply the whole city with water and laid pipes accordingly, but for lack of adequate custom its venture proved unprofitable, and the works were eventually abandoned.5

A

An examination of the census statistics of 1800 brings out the rather surprising fact that many of the companies were established in small towns, while many of the larger towns had none. In Massachusetts (including Maine), for example, nine out of sixteen companies clearly chartered were in towns with populations between one and two thousand, and four more in towns of less than twenty-four hundred. Of the towns with over five thousand population, only Portsmouth, Boston, Salem, New London, Hartford, New York, Baltimore, and Charleston were 1 Osgood and Batchelder, Salem, 69–71; J. W. Hanson, History of the Town of Danvers (Danvers, 1848), 154.

2 William T. Davis, Ancient Landmarks of Plymouth (Boston, 1883), 127. 'N. H. MSS. Laws, xi, 18 (Index, 24); Nathaniel Adams, Annals of Portsmouth (Portsmouth, 1825), 319-320; petition in N. H. State Papers, xiii, 305. 4 N. J. Hist. Soc. Proc., 1st Series, viii, 32 (1856); Session Laws, 1799, p. 617, 1800, p. 10.

Caulkins, New London, 663.

provided before 1800 with water companies, and three of these had populations only slightly exceeding five thousand. There was, in other words, no clear general tendency to the establishment of water supply corporations in the eighteenth century.

In the main, large investments in aqueducts were premature from the private capitalists' standpoint, in view of the low value currently placed upon pure water in ample quantities and the technical difficulties of constructing serviceable and durable works. Had values been based on "long-run" considerations the situation might have been different, for poor water supplies had a heavy responsibility for both the epidemics and the conflagrations which inflicted serious losses upon at least the larger towns. Furthermore, the advantages secured by the smaller companies were not so greatly appreciated that there was widespread imitation, and where associations were established incorporation did not always seem worth the bother of securing it.

These charters are, in general, exceedingly brief and simple. Commonly no specification is made as to directors, capital stock, or par value, and only occasionally is a limitation imposed on the amount of property which may be held. Powers of eminent domain are rarely given; indeed it is usually specified that the use of the spring and the laying of the pipes over private property shall be conditioned on the voluntary consent of the landowners concerned. Powers are commonly granted for laying pipes in the streets, usually with the restriction that travellers shall not be inconvenienced thereby, often with the reservation that not more than a few rods shall be torn up at any one time, and sometimes subject to permission and regulation of the town authorities. Penalties for injuring the "works" are nearly always designated. Frequently no provision is made for directors, and the assumption is that the proprietors themselves, with their committees, will be adequate to handle the business. Further, it is assumed that in the main the water users will be the members of the corporations, dividends are rarely mentioned, and assessments on shares are often spoken of as "taxes." In short, the companies were commonly coöperative rather than capitalistic, like the mutual insurance companies.

For manufacturing companies, more than for any of the preceding groups of corporations, this period was one of tentative beginnings, and the story here to be told is one of experiment, on the whole unsuccessful, in applying a device for which the economic conditions were not ripe. It is a story also, however, of a tendency in the direction of the corporation by enterprises not yet incorporated.

Throughout this period household manufacture was widespread in America. Peter Colt of Hartford wrote for the Secretary of the Treasury, July 21, 1791, that there was "scarcely a Family in the State either so rich or so poor as not to be concerned therein."1 Anselm Bailey wrote similarly from Surry, Va., a month later, that in that state an average of about two hundred yards of cloth (mostly cotton) was turned out annually by each family and that five-sixths of all the cloth, shoes, and stockings were home made.2 In 1794 Henry Wansey wrote of New Jersey:

"Spinning of flax, is the general employment in private families in the evenings, and when they are not in the fields; each family usually making their own coarse linen, which they put out to weave, and afterwards bleach and finish at home.3

Some manufacturing was organized upon the so-called "domestic system," with a capitalist entrepreneur dealing with numbers of home workers. Fisher Ames said in Congress in 1789:

"It has become common for the country people in Massachusetts to work small forges in their chimney corners; and in winter, and in evenings, when little other work can be done, great quantities of nails are made even by children. These people take the rod iron of the merchant and return to him the nails, and in consequence of this easy mode of barter the manufacture is prodigiously great."4

The wool-card and cotton-card industry in and around Boston was similarly organized and attained importance at this time. In

1 Hamilton Papers.

2 Ibid., Aug. 23, 1791.

Journal of an Excursion, 101. See also descriptions of manufactures in Connecticut Courant, July 14, 1788; Phineas Bond to the Duke of Leeds, from Philadelphia, Nov. 10, 1789, in Amer. Hist. Assoc. Report, 1897, i, 651–654.

Quoted by J. M. Swank, in Mag. of Amer. Hist., xiii, 100.

July, 1789, it was stated that Giles Richards & Co. had produced sixty-one thousand eight hundred pair in the preceding eleven months, fifty per cent cheaper than the imported product, and that over eight hundred persons were employed in the industry. Two years later it was reported that sixteen hundred women and children were employed to stick the cards and that twothirds of the ten thousand dozens of product were exported from the state, at a value of $53,000.1 .

In America, as in England, the great bulk of manufacturing enterprises, as they emerged from the household stage, were individual or partnership undertakings. This, for example, was the form of organization characteristic, throughout the colonial period and long afterwards, of the typical manufacturing establishments-grist mills, saw mills, iron forges and foundries, slitting mills, fulling mills, paper mills, glass works, and the like. None of these unincorporated enterprises attained large scale, as they did at this time in England and in France.2 Phineas Bond, British consul at Philadelphia, reported in 1789 that the ordinary capital of the numerous paper mills in that vicinity was £1500-1600, Pennsylvania currency, four-fifths of it invested in mills and buildings-too small for manufacturing any but coarse grades.3 Accounted large was the plant of James Caldwell, merchant of Albany, erected in 1790-91, containing a snuff mill, chocolate mill, mustard mill, an "engine" for cutting smoking tobacco, and a machine for cutting tobacco for the snuff mill. The output of his snuff mill was estimated at more than the consumption in the northern states. O. Burr & Co. of Danbury, the largest hat manufacturers in Connecticut, had an output of between £1300 and £1400 in 1790 and sent "large quantities" abroad.5 Mix, Barney & Co., button manu

1 Columbian Centinel, July 29, 1789, June 8, 1791; Mass. Magazine, iii, 268–269 (May, 1791).

2 Cf. the report in the General Advertiser (Philadelphia), March 28, 1792, of English manufactories employing 19-20,000 (Peele, Wedgewood), 12-15,000 (Phillips & Co.), 8-9000 (Arkwright). Arthur Young mentions in his Travels in France (Aug. 26, 1787) a tide corn mill constructed by a company at Bordeaux costing £350,000. 3 Amer. Hist. Assoc. Report, 1896, i, 633-634.

♦ Described in N. Y. Magazine, ii, 268-269 (May, 1791). Cf. Munsell, Annals of Albany, i, 338-340.

5 J. P. Cook to John Chester, Sept. 12, 1791, in Hamilton Papers.