(Presbyterian) at Bloomfield; and the Theological Seminary of the (Dutch) Reformed Church in America, at New Brunswick. There are many private academies and secondary schools, sectarian and non-sectarian.
The state supports the following charitable and correctional institutions all under the inspection of a State Department of Charities and Correction (1905); hospitals for the insane at Trenton and Morris Plains; a training-school for feeble-minded children (partly supported by the state) and a home for feeble-minded women at Vineland; a sanatorium for tuberculous diseases at Glen Gardner; a village for epileptics, with a farm of 700 acres, near Skillman, Somerset county; a state home (reform school) for boys near Jamesburg, Middlesex county, and for girls in Ewing township, near Trenton; a state reformatory for criminals sixteen to thirty years of age, near Rahway; a state prison at Trenton; a home for disabled soldiers at Kearney,[1] Hudson county; a home for disabled soldiers, sailors and their wives at Vineland[2]; and a school for the deaf at Trenton. There is no institution for the blind, but the state pays the expenses of blind children who are sent from New Jersey to the New York State School for the Blind. A State Board of Children’s Guardians, with an office in Jersey City, cares for destitute children. A convict parole law went into operation in 1891.
Finance.—The revenues for state and for local purposes are derived from separate sources. The expenses of the state government are met chiefly by special taxes on railway and canal corporations, a franchise tax on the capital stock of other corporations, a collateral inheritance tax and leases of riparian lands. The counties and municipalities derive their revenues chiefly from taxes on real and personal property. Real and personal property is free from a state tax, except for school purposes. The school tax is apportioned among the counties in proportion to their taxable property.
A large part of the state’s revenue comes from the tax on railways and canals, which is levied on the property actually employed in their operation. Any property of railways other than the “main stem” (i.e. the road-bed with the rails and sleepers not over 100 ft. in width),[3] that is employed in operating the road or canal is taxed by the state for local purposes. Counties and municipalities may tax property within their jurisdiction belonging to railways but not actually used for railway purposes. Domestic telegraph, telephone, express, cable, parlour- and sleeping-car, gas- and electric-lighting, oil and pipe line companies, and several classes of insurance companies, are taxed on the amount of their gross receipts. Other domestic corporations are taxed on the amount of their capital stock. The rate of this tax decreases as the amount of capital stock increases, thus favouring large corporations. On all capital stock up to $3,000,000, the rate is one-tenth of 1%; on all amounts between three and five million dollars, the rate is one-twentieth of 1%; and on all above five million dollars, thirty dollars per million, or 3/1000 of 1%. An inheritance tax is levied on all bequests in excess of $500 to persons other than specially excepted classes; and in 1907 the receipts from the “collateral inheritance tax” were $241,480. County and municipal revenue are derived from the tax on general property. The poll tax is restricted almost entirely to municipalities, which devote the proceeds to roads and schools. The fees received for issuing charters to corporations are another source of revenue to the state. Toward corporations the policy of New Jersey has always been liberal; there is no limit fixed either to capitalization or to bonded indebtedness; the tax rate, as already indicated, is lower for large than for small corporations; and so many large combinations of capital have been incorporated under the laws of the state that it is sometimes called “the home of the trusts.” For the fiscal year 1907 the fees collected from corporations by the secretary of state amounted to $204,454, the receipts from the tax on corporations other than railways amounted to $2,584,363·60, and the receipts from the tax on railway corporations were $807,780.[4] It is the revenue from these sources that has enabled New Jersey to dispense almost entirely with the general property tax for state purposes. The legal requirement that every corporation chartered by the state must maintain its principal office there has given rise to the peculiar institution called the “corporation agency,” a single office which serves as the “principal office” of numbers of corporations. At the close of the fiscal year 1907 the state was free from bonded indebtedness,[5] and had a balance on hand of $1,320,038 (much less than in 1906, because of the non-payment of railway taxes, pending litigation). In the state fund, the total receipts for the year were $4,602,100, and the total disbursements, $5,366,813.
History.—Bones and implements have been found in the Quaternary gravels at Trenton, which have been held by some authorities to prove the presence of Palaeolithic man; but the earliest inhabitants of New Jersey of whom there is any certain record were the Lenni-Lennapé or Delaware Indians, a branch of the Algonquian family. They were most numerous in the southern and central portions of the state, preferring the river valleys; but their total number, perhaps, never exceeded a thousand. Between them and the European settlers there were seldom any manifestations of acute hostility, though each race feared and distrusted the other. Many Indians were enslaved, and intermarriage between them and negro slaves became common. During the 18th century the Indian title to the soil was rapidly extinguished, and at the same time the vices and diseases of the stronger race were gradually reducing their numbers. In 1758 an Indian reservation, said to have been the first established within the present limits of the United States, was established at Edgepelick, or Brotherton (now called Indian Mills) in Burlington county. The surviving aborigines remained there until 1802, when they joined the Mohegans in New York and migrated to Wisconsin and later to Indian Territory, now part of the state of Oklahoma. For the extinction of all Indian titles the legislature of New Jersey in 1832 appropriated $2000, and since that date almost every vestige of Indian occupation has disappeared.
The first authenticated visit of a European to what is now New Jersey was made under French authority by Giovanni da Verrazano, a Florentine navigator, who in the spring of 1524 sailed within Sandy Hook and dropped anchor in the waters of upper New York Bay. In the following year Estevan Gomez, a Portuguese sailor in the service of the emperor Charles V., in his reputed voyage southward from Labrador, is said to have made note of the Hudson and Delaware rivers. It is very probable, also, that French traders soon afterward penetrated the region along the lower Hudson. Voyages to this region for exploration, trade and settlement, however, may be said to have really begun with the year 1609, when Henry Hudson explored the region between Sandy Hook and Raritan Bay and sailed up the river which now bears his name. After this voyage came Dutch traders, who established themselves on Manhattan Island and soon spread across the Hudson river into what are now Hudson and Bergen counties. In 1614 Cornelis Jacobsen Mey explored the lower Delaware, and two years later Cornelis Hendricksen more thoroughly explored this stream. In 1623 the first party of permanent homeseekers arrived at New Amsterdam, and a portion of these formed a settlement on the eastern bank of the Delaware and built Fort Nassau near the site of the present Gloucester City. In 1631 Samuel Godyn and Samuel Blommaert secured a patent from Peter Minuit, the director of New Netherland, authorizing them to plant a settlement near Cape May, but the effort was soon abandoned. A trading hut built at Paulus Hook in 1633 was the beginning of the present Jersey City. On the western bank of the Hudson the trading post of Hobocanhackingh, on the site of the present city of Hoboken, was established at an early date. From these places and from New Amsterdam the Dutch spread into the Raritan Valley. During the rule of Governor William Kieft, the Indians, disturbed by the encroachments of the settlers, assumed a hostile attitude. The actual occasion of the Indian outbreak was the massacre of a number of Tappan Indians in 1643 by soldiers acting under Kieft’s orders. From the Connecticut to the Raritan the savages rose in arms, laid waste the farms, massacred the settlers and compelled those who escaped to take refuge on Manhattan Island. The Dutch engaged the services of about fifty Englishmen under Captain John Underhill, a hero of the Pequot War, and in 1644 the Indians were defeated in several engagements, but a general peace with them was not established until the 30th of August 1645.
In the meantime colonists of another nationality had set foot on the shores of the lower Delaware. To found a colony in
- ↑ Also receives Federal aid.
- ↑ Idem.
- ↑ Passenger stations and depot buildings were included as part of the “main stem” until 1906, when their exclusion gave considerable added revenue to the municipalities.
- ↑ The tax on railway corporations collected by the state for local purposes and paid over to the local governments in 1907 amounted to $581,794.
- ↑ The only state debt is state certificates for $116,000 issued to the commissioners of the Agricultural College.
