National Nominating Conventions (to be hereafter described) imply that the unenfranchised position of the residents in a Territory is felt to be indefensible in theory?"

This is true. If it were possible under the Federal Constitution to admit Territorial residents to active Federal citizenshipthat is to say, to Federal suffrage-admitted they would be. But the Union is a union of States. It knows no representatives in Congress, no electors for the Presidency, except those chosen in States by State voters. The only means of granting Federal suffrage to citizens in a Territory would be to turn the Territory into a State. This would confer a power of self-government, guaranteed by the Federal Constitution, for which the Territory might be still unfit. But it would do still more. It would entitle this possibly small and rude community to send two senators to the Federal Senate who would there have as much weight as the two senators from New York with its six millions of people. This is a result from which Congress may fairly recoil. And a practical illustration of the evils to be feared has been afforded by the case of Nevada, a State whose inhabitants number only about 40,000, and which is really a group of burnt-out mining camps. Its population is obviously unworthy of the privilege of sending two men to the Senate, and has in fact allowed itself to sink, for political purposes, into a sort of rotten borough which can be controlled or purchased by the leaders of a Silver Ring. It would evidently have been better to allow Nevada to remain in the condition of a Territory till a large settled and orderly community had occupied her surface, which is at present a parched and dismal desert, in which the streams descending from the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada soon lose themselves in lakes or marshes. On a review of the whole matter it may safely be said that the American scheme of Territorial government, though it suffers from the occasional incompetence of the Governor, and is inconsistent with democratic theory, has in practice worked well, and gives little ground for discontent even to the inhabitants of the Territories themselves.

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CHAPTER XLVIII

LOCAL GOVERNMENT

THIS is the place for an account of local government in the United States, because it is a matter regulated not by Federal law but by the several States and Territories, each of which establishes such local authorities, rural and urban, as the people of the State or Territory desire, and invests them with the requisite powers. But this very fact indicates the immensity of the subject. Each State has its own system of local areas and authorities, created and worked under its own laws; and though these systems agree in many points, they differ in so many others, that a whole volume would be needed to give even a summary view of their peculiarities. All I can here attempt is to distinguish the leading types of local government to be found in the United States, to describe the prominent features of each type, and to explain the influence which the large scope and popular character of local administration exércise upon the general life and well-being of the American people.

Three types of rural local government are discernible in America. The first is characterized by its unit, the Town or Township, and exists in the six New England States. The second is characterized by a much larger unit, the county, and prevails in the southern States. The third combines some features of the first with some of the second, and may be called the mixed system. It is found, under a considerable variety of forms, in the middle and north-western States. The differences of these three types are interesting, not only because of the practical instruction they afford, but also because they spring from original differences in the character of the colonist who settled along the American coast, and in the conditions under which the communities there founded were developed.

The first New England settlers were Puritans in religion, and sometimes inclined to republicanism in politics. They were

largely townsfolk, accustomed to municipal life and to vestry meetings. They planted their tiny communities along the seashore and the banks of rivers, enclosing them with stockades for protection against the warlike Indians. Each was obliged to be self-sufficing, because divided by rocks and woods from the others. Each had its common pasture on which the inhabitants turned out their cattle, and which officers were elected to manage. Each was a religious as well as a civil body politic, gathered round the church as its centre; and the equality which prevailed in the congregation prevailed also in civil affairs, the whole community meeting under a president or moderator to discuss affairs of common interest. Each such settlement was called a Town, or Township, and was in fact a miniature commonwealth, exercising a practical sovereignty over the property and persons of its members-for there was as yet no State, and the distant home government scarcely cared to interfere-but exercising it on thoroughly democratic principles. Its centre was a group of dwellings, often surrounded by a fence or wall, but it included a rural area of several square miles, over which farmhouses and clusters of houses began to spring up when the Indians retired. The name "town" covered the whole of this area, which was never too large for all the inhabitants to come together to a central place of meeting. This town organization remained strong and close, the colonists being men of narrow means, and held together in each settlement by the needs of defence. And though presently the towns became aggregated into counties, and the legislature and governor, first of the whole colony, and, after 1776, of the State, began to exert their superior authority, the towns (which, be it remembered, remained rural communities, making up the whole area of the State) held their ground, and are to this day the true units of political life in New England, the solid foundation of that well-compacted structure of selfgovernment which European philosophers have admired and the new States of the West have sought to reproduce. Till 18211

1 Boston continued to be a town governed by a primary assembly of all citizens till 1822; and even then the town-meeting was not quite abolished, for a provision was introduced, intended to satisfy conservative democratic feeling, into the city charter granted by statute in that year, empowering the mayor and aldermen to call general meetings of the citizens qualified to vote in city affairs "to consult upon the common good, to give instructions to their representatives, and to take all lawful means to obtain a redress of any grievances." Such primary assemblies are, however, never now convoked.

the towns were the only political corporate bodies in Massachusetts, and till 1857 they formed, as they still form in Connecticut, the basis of representation in her Assembly, each town, however small, returning at least one member. Much of that robust, if somewhat narrow, localism which characterizes the representative system of America is due to this originally distinct and self-sufficing corporate life of the seventeenth century towns. Nor is it without interest to observe that although they owed much to the conditions which surrounded the early colonists, forcing them to develop a civic patriotism resembling that of the republics of ancient Greece and Italy, they owed something also to those Teutonic traditions of semi-independent local communities, owning common property, and governing themselves by a primary assembly of all free inhabitants, which the English had brought with them from the Elbe and the Weser, and which had been perpetuated in the practice of many parts of England down till the days of the Stuart kings.

Very different were the circumstances of the Southern colonies. The men who went to Virginia and the Carolinas were not Puritans, nor did they mostly go in families and groups of families from the same neighbourhood. Many were casual adventurers, often belonging to the upper class, Episcopalians in religion, and with no such experience of, or attachment to, local self-government as the men of Massachusetts or Connecticut. They settled in a region where the Indian tribes were comparatively peaceable, and where therefore there was little need of concentration for the purposes of defence. The climate along the coast was somewhat too hot for European labour, so slaves were imported to cultivate the land. Population was thinly scattered; estates were large; the soil was fertile and soon enriched its owners. Thus a semi-feudal society grew up, in which authority naturally fell to the landowners, each of whom was the centre of a group of free dependants as well as the master of an increasing crowd of slaves. There were therefore comparatively few urban communities, and the life of the colony took a rural type. The houses of the planters lay miles apart from one another; and when local divisions had to be created, these were made large enough to include a considerable area of territory and number of land-owning gentlemen. They were therefore

rural divisions, counties framed on the model of English counties. Smaller circumscriptions there were, such as hundreds and parishes, but the hundred died out,1 the parish ultimately became a purely ecclesiastical division, and the parish vestry was restricted to ecclesiastical functions, while the county remained the practically important unit of local administration, the unit to which the various functions of government were aggregated, and which, itself controlling minor authorities, was controlled by the State government alone. The affairs of the county were usually managed by a board of elective commissioners, and not, like those of the New England towns, by a primary assembly; and in an aristocratic society the leading planters had of course a predominating influence. Hence this form of local government was not only less democratic, but less stimulating and educative than that which prevailed in the New England States. Nor was the Virginian county, though so much larger than the New England town, ever as important an organism over against the State. It may almost be said, that while a New England State is a combination of towns, a Southern State is from the first an administrative as well as political whole, whose subdivisions, the counties, had never any truly independent life, but were and are mere subdivisions for the convenient dispatch of judicial and financial business.

In the middle States of the Union, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York, settled or conquered by Englishmen some time. later than New England, the town and town meeting did not as a rule exist, and the county was the original basis of organization. But as there grew up no planting aristocracy like that of Virginia or the Carolinas, the course of events took in the middle States a different direction. As trade and manufactures grew, population became denser than in the South. New England influenced them, and influenced still more the newer common

1 In Maryland hundreds, which still exist in Delaware, were for a long time the chief administrative divisions. We hear there also of "baronies" and "townlands," as in Ireland; and Maryland is usually called a "province," while the other settlements are colonies. Among its judicial establishments there were courts of pypowdry (piè poudré) and "hustings." See the interesting paper on "Local Institutions in Maryland," by Dr. Wilhelm, in Johns Hopkins University Studies, Third Series.

The hundred is a division of small consequence in southern England, but in Lancashire it has some important duties. It repairs the bridges; it is liable for damage done in a riot; and it had its high constable.