for something in modifying them, there is nothing which we may safely
disregard as trivial. This is true of whatever we can study; it is
eminently true of the history of institutions. Government is not a
royal mystery, to be shut off, like old Deiokes,[2] by a sevenfold
wall from the ordinary business of life. Questions of civil government
are practical business questions, the principles of which are as often
and as forcibly illustrated in a city council or a county board of
supervisors, as in the House of Representatives at Washington. It is
partly because too many of our citizens fail to realize that local
government is a worthy study, that we find it making so much trouble
for us. The "bummers" and "boodlers" do not find the subject beneath
their notice; the Master who inspires them is wide awake and--for a
creature that divides the hoof--extremely intelligent.

[Footnote 2: Herodotus, i. 98.]

It is, moreover, the mental training gained through contact with
local government that enables the people of a community to conduct
successfully, through their representatives, the government of the
state and the nation. And so it makes a great deal of difference
whether the government of a town or county is of one sort or another.
If the average character of our local governments for the past quarter
of a century had been _quite_ as high as that of the Boston
town-meeting or the Virginia boards of county magistrates, in the days
of Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry, who can doubt that many an airy
demagogue, who, through session after session, has played his pranks
at the national capital, would long ago have been abruptly recalled to
his native heath, a sadder if not a wiser man? We cannot expect the
nature of the aggregate to be much better than the average natures
of its units. One may hear people gravely discussing the difference