1884.]
��TIic New England Toivn-Hoiise.
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��council, for the performance of all acts of legislation for the common good, is the outgrowth of and exists only by virtue of the towns. The towns created it, compose it, send up to it its heart- and-life blood. This it is which makes the New England town unique, attract- ing the attention and interest of intelli- gent foreigners who visit our shores. Judge Parker • says : " I very well recollect the curiosity expressed by some of the gentlemen in the suite of Lafayette, on his visit to this country in 1825, respecting these town organi- zations and their powers and opera- tions." In the same connection he adds that " a careful examination of the history of the New England towns will show that," instead of being mod- eled after the town of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, or the free cities of the conti- nent of the twelfth century, " they were not founded or modeled on precedent " at all. Mr. E. A. Freeman, however, puts it more truthfully in saying : " The circumstances of New England called the primitive assembly (that is, the Homeric agora, Athenian ekklesia, Roman comitia, Swiss landesgemeinde, English folk-moot) again into being, when in the older England it was well- nigh forgotten. What in Switzerland was a j-//rvival was in New England rather a ;-(fvival." *
Our New England town-house, there- fore, is a symbol of institutions, partly original with our fathers, partly a price- less inheritance from Old England the land of our fathers, and nearly in the whole, if not quite, a regermination and new growth of old race instincts and practices on a new soil.
The New England town is not an institution of all the States, but its
- Introduction to American Institutional History.
Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science.
��principle has invaded the majority. To the West and Northwest it has been carried by the New Englander himself, and is being carried by him both directly and indirectly into the South and Southwest, and will show there in no great length of time its prevailing and vitalizing power.
It was Jefferson, himself a Virginian, reared in the midst of another system, aristocratical and central in its character, who said : " These wards, called town- ships in New England, are the vital principle of their governments, and have proved themselves the wisest invention ever devised by the wit of man for the perfect exercise of self- government and for its preservation."
The New England town-house, there- fore, is significant of more than its predecessor in England or Germany. While with them it means freedom in the management of local affairs, beyond them it means a relation to the State and the National government which they did not. It means not merely a broad basis for the general govern- ment in the people, that the people are the reason and remote source of govern- ing power, but that they are themselves the governors. Every man who enters a New England town-house and casts his vote knows that that expression of his will is a force which reaches, or may reach, the Legislature of his State, the governor in his chair, the Nationar Congress, and the President in the White House at Washington. He feels an interest therefore, and a responsibility which the voter in no other land in the world feels, and the town-house is an education to him in the art of self-government which no other country affords, and because of it the town is an institution teaching how to maintain government, local,
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