288
��The New England Town-House.
��[May,
��bearing date in the year 1399 : " Thomas Goodeall came before the jurats in the common Jiall on the loth day of October, and covenanted to give for his freedom 2od., and so he was received and sworn to bear fealty to our Lord the King and his successors, and to the commonalty and liberty of the port of Hethe, and to render faith- ful account of his lots and scots * as freeman there are wont." In another entry, in the same year, the building is mentioned again as the " Common House."
We may go further back than this. History tells us that " the boroughs (towns) of England, during the period of oppression, after the Norman in- vasion, led the way in the silent growth and elevation of the English people ; that, unnoticed and despised by pre- late and noble, they had alone preserved the full tradition of Teutonic liberty ; that, by their traders and shopkeepers, the rights of self-government, of free speech in free meeting, of equal justice by one's equals, were brought safely across the ages of Norman tyranny."! The rights of self-government and free speech in free meeting, then, were rights and practices of our Anglo-Saxon ancestry, and we are to go back with them across the English channel to their barbarian German home, and to the people described by Tacitus in his Germania, for the origin, as far as we can trace it, of this part of our inher- itance. These people were famed for their spirit of independence and free- dom. The mass are described as free- men, voting together in the great assemblies of the tribe, and choosing
- The " lot" was the obligation to perform the public
services which might fall to the inhabitants by clue rotation. " Scot " means tax.
t Green's Short History of the English People, chap. ii, sec. 6.
��their own leaders or kings from the class of nobles, who were nobles not as constituting a distinct and privileged caste. " It was their greater estates and the greater consequence which accom- panied these that marked their rank." When we first learn of these assemblies, they are out-of-doors, under the broad canopy of heaven alone, but the time came, as the rathhaus of the German town to-day attests, when they built the common hall or town-house ; and we, to-day, in this remote and then un- known and unconjectured land of the West, are in this regard their heirs as well as descendants. J
In what, then, is the New England town-house more than, or different from, the English town-house ? In this, that it is the State-house of a little demo- cratic republic which came into exis- tence of and by itself of a natural necessity, and not merely governs itself, making all the laws of local need and executing them — levying taxes, maintaining schools, and taking charge of its own poor, of roads, bridges, and all matters pertaining to the health, peace, and safety of all within its bounds, in a word, all things which it can do for itself, — but also in confederation with other little democratic republics has called into being, and clothed with all the power it has for those matters of common need which the town cannot do, the State. The State of Massachu- setts, from the day that the people created the General Court the body it still is, by electing deputies from the towns, — representatives we now call them, — to sit instead of the whole body of freemen, with the governor and
\ The present rathhaus of the quaint old city of Nuremberg, built in 1619, is a notable building, much visited by travelers. Around the wall of the hall within runs the legend: " Eins manns red ist eine halbe red, man soil die teyl verhoren bed," — " One man's talk is a half talk; one should he.Tr both sides."
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