Excerpt from Billerica a Centennial Oration by the Rev. Elias Nason, July 4, 1876 To arrive at 1655 we must pass by our dreadful civil war, the introduction of the steamship and the railroad, the exploits of Napoleon the First, the atroci ties of the reign of terror, the days of our illustrious Washington and our grand old Revolution; we must traverse the times of the old French wars, of George the First, of Addison, Pope, Swift and the Spectator, go by the dark days of Salem Witchcraft, of the great English Revolution when the house of Stuart fell, of King Philip's bloody war, of the fire of London, and come to the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, whose Latin Secretary, John Milton, was then brooding over his immortal poem, Paradise Lost. There were when Billerica was incorporated but nine towns in Middlesex County; the governor and magistrates were appointed by the Lord Protector, and the manners and customs of the people were entirely different from our own. The fathers of this town were rigid puritans. They came to New England to escape the imperious mandates of the star chamber and that intolerance which prompted James the First to say I will make them conform, or I will harry them out of the kingdom. They loved religious liberty; they preferred to face the perils of the savage wilderness rather than to worship God in forms prescribed for them by king or prelate. They were hardy, brave, intelligent yeomen; prompt to meet danger, jealous of any encroachment 011 their civil rights and true as steel to the grand principle which is the very core and kernel of repub lican institutions, that in church, in state and town affairs the majority must rule. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.