efficacy and most vital force. It remitted to the people their
original sovereignty. Before, that sovereignty had rested in the hands
of a remote central deputation; this returned it to them in their
primary capacity, and brought it back, in its most important elements,
to their immediate control. It gave them complete possession and
absolute power over their own lands, and provided the machinery for
managing their own neighborhoods and making and executing their own
laws in what is, after all, the greatest sphere of government,--that
which concerns ordinary, daily, immediate relations. It gave to the
people the power to do and determine all that the people can do and
determine, by themselves. It created the towns as the solid foundation
of the whole political structure of the State, trained the people as
in a perpetual school for self-government, and fitted them to be the
guardians of republican liberty and order.

Large tracts were granted to men who had the disposition and the means
for improving them by opening roads, building bridges, clearing
forests, and bringing the surface into a state for cultivation. Men of
property, education, and high social position, were thus made to lead
the way in developing the agricultural resources of the country, and
giving character to the farming interest and class. In cases where men
of energy, industry, and intelligence presented themselves, if not
adventurers in the common stock, with no other property than their
strong arms and resolute wills, particularly if they had able-bodied
sons, liberal grants were made. Every one who had received a town lot
of half an acre was allowed to relinquish it, receiving, in exchange,
a country lot of fifty acres or more. Under this system, a population
of a superior order was led out into the forest. Farms quickly spread
into the interior, seeking the meadows, occupying the arable land, and
especially following up the streams.