New England people, town-meetings are held, though their powers are
somewhat less extensive than in New England. In the settlement of
Virginia it was attempted to copy directly the parishes and vestries,
boroughs and guilds of England. But in the southern states generally the
great size of the plantations and the wide dispersion of the population
hindered the growth of towns, so that it was impossible to have an
administrative unit smaller than the county. As Tocqueville said fifty
years ago, "the farther south we go the less active does the business of
the township or parish become; the population exercises a less immediate
influence on affairs; the power of the elected magistrate is augmented
and that of the election diminished, while the public spirit of the
local communities is less quickly awakened and less influential." This
is almost equally true to-day; yet with all these differences in local
organization, there is no part of our country in which the spirit of
local self-government can be called weak or uncertain. I have described
the Town-meeting as it exists in the states where it first grew up and
has since chiefly flourished. But something very like the "town-meeting
principle" lies at the bottom of all the political life of the United
States. To maintain vitality in the centre without sacrificing it in the
parts; to preserve tranquillity in the mutual relations of forty
powerful states, while keeping the people everywhere as far as possible
in direct contact with the government; such is the political problem
which the American Union exists for the purpose of solving; and of this
great truth every American citizen is supposed to have some glimmering,
however crude.

It has been said that the town-governments of New England were
established without any conscious reference to precedent; but, however
this may be, they are certainly not without precedents and analogies, to
enumerate which will carry us very far back in the history of the Aryan