fined to mere supervision; in such hands it was held to mean that the Imperial parliament could at any moment override the acts of the colonial assemblies, without consulting their wishes at all, and tax and legislate for the people of Massachusetts and Virginia just as it could for the people of Kent and Middlesex. Out of the conflict which finally arose Out of the between the English and the colonial theories as to the grew the practical omnipotence of the Imperial parliament over self- War of the governing communities beyond the four seas, grew the War of the Revolution, and the severance of the colonies from the mother country.1 conflict Revolution. ganization Having briefly outlined the external relations of the colo- Internal ornies both to the crown and to the parliament, let us return of the colto the question of their internal organization. In the sketch onies. heretofore drawn of the growth of the English kingdom the conclusion was reached that in its matured form it represented an aggregation of shires, — each shire representing an aggregation of hundreds, each hundred, an aggregation of townships. In the examination which will be hereafter made of the making of England the fact will be drawn out that the "unit of the constitutional machinery" was the township the English form of the village-community- the primary form in which Englishmen group themselves together for self-government. Out of a union of townships grew what English was finally known in England as the hundred; out of a union kingdom the product of hundreds grew the modern shire; out of a union of modern of aggregashires grew the English kingdom. The most important fact which this process of state-building reveals is that the Teutonic conquerors of Britain accomplished the work of conquest in small companies, and that, in obedience to the race instinct, they grouped themselves together in townships out of whose coalescence finally arose the larger aggregates. The power to subdue and settle a new country, and then to build up a state by this process of aggregation, constitutes the strength of the English nation as a colonizing nation. By this process, 1 The two conflicting theories are clearly stated by Green, Hist. of the English People, vol. iv. pp. 226-230. Although this conflict of theory as to the jurisdiction of the Imperial parliament was no doubt the visible and technical cause of separation, was not the real cause that stated by Turgot, who said tion. duct of the Federal re- capable under favorable geographical conditions of unlimited public of the United expansion, has been built up the federal republic of the United States pro- States. "In America . . . it may be said that the township same gener- was organized before the county, the county before the State al process. the State before the Union."1 In order to ascertain how the English colonies in America were constructed, we must look behind their charters at the lives of the men who made the settlements out of which they grew. "Under the shell there was an animal, and behind the document there was a man. . . . The shell and the document are lifeless wrecks, valuable only as a clue to the entire and living existence. We must reach back to this existence, endeavor to recreate it."2 In the effort to recreate the process through which the English colonies in America were made, we must keep steadily in view the process through which their prototype. in Britain was made. The elements of organization in both were the same, and the general principle upon which such elements coalesced was substantially the same. It may be stated as a general rule that the English colony in America, like the English state in Britain, represented an aggregation County and of counties, and that each county represented an aggregation township of townships. The hundred the intermediate division. the organs of local ad between the township and the county,-appeared in the structure of some of the colonies, but being unnecessary to the local wants of the new land it passed out of view.3 In some instances the colony was formed by the coalescence of the local communities before a charter was granted; in others the charter was granted first and the colony then subdivided into districts as the local communities were organized. The fruit of both processes was the same a dependent statesubdivided into counties and townships as the organs of its local administration. The most striking fact which stands. ministra tion. 1 Tocqueville, Democracy in Am., vol. i. p. 49. "Upon the township was formed the county, composed of several towns similarly organized; the state composed of several counties, and, finally, the United States, composed of several states; each organization a body politic, with definite governing powers in a subordinate series." - Address of Mr. Lewis H. Morgan before Am. Ass. for the Adv. of Science, Boston, Aug. 26, 1880. northern ship, in the the county, agent. out in the history of these local communities in the new land is that wherever the one became the active agent of local administration, the other, while it did not cease to exist, became dormant. In America the county and the township did not reappear as co-working agents dividing the duties of local administration in anything like equal proportions. In In the the northern colonies where population became dense, and colonies where the active spirit of the English yeoman and trader the townreproduced a system of political life as closely organized as it southern was vigorous, the township became the active organ of local the active administration for the simple reason that its compact organization was better adapted than that of the shire to the local wants of New England. In the southern colonies where population was more sparse, and where the southern planter reproduced the more tranquil life of the English gentleman who had little or nothing to do with the life of towns, the county became the active organ of local administration for the reason that it satisfied all of the political wants of a rural population. To that extent the local organizations of the northern and southern colonies were different from each other. "Townships and town arrangements exist in every state; but in no other part of the Union is a township to be met with precisely similar to those of New England. The farther we go toward the South, the less active does the business of the township or parish become . . . As we leave New England we find that the importance of the town is gradually transferred to the county, which becomes the centre of administration, and the intermediate power between the government and the citizen."2 While the township or parish was thus overshadowed in the southern colonies by county organization, the New England county maintained nothing more than a shadowy existence as a local district for certain judicial purposes.3 In the middle colonies the two opposing 1 In revising the MS. Mr. Freeman here wrote: "I found in Virginia people spoke of the county just as they do here. In New England the county seemed lost. There the town was the thing, when the city had not swallowed it up." In his "Introduction to Am. Inst. Hist.," J. H. Studies, 1st series, I. p. 17, Mr. Freeman, in comparing Virginia with New Fngland, has said that "the two lands represent two different 2 Tocqueville, Democracy in Am., 8 See Washburn, Judicial Hist. of Mass., p. 31, note 1. system in the middle colonies. Composite systems fought for the mastery, and the result was a composite system which approached nearer than either to the original model by dividing between the town and the county in something like equal proportions the duties of local gov ernment.1 The town England. The remarkable fact is that the township reappears upon ship in New the soil of New England rather in the form in which it appeared in Britain when the foundations of the English kingdom were laid than in the form in which it there existed when the migration to America began. The township as it originally appeared in Britain was at once a cultivating and political community in whose qualified members resided the power to elect their own officers and to order their own village and agricultural life. This power was vested in a single village assembly or tun-moot in which the townsmen met to regulate their internal affairs by the making of bylaws, laws enacted by a "by"-as the township was called in the northern shires. But during the ten centuries which intervened between the Teutonic conquest and settlement of Britain and the making of the English settlements in America the primitive township passed through a marked Township transformation. In the process of English feudalization the township was transformed into the manor of the lord, and the once free townsmen became the lord's tenants, while the greater part of the ancient jurisdiction of the tun-moot passed to the manorial courts. And more than this, the township in the home land became involved in ecclesiastical as well as as the par- in feudal relations. As a division in the territorial organization of the church the township became the parish, and as such its boundaries were used to define the jurisdiction of a single priest, "in small parishes the idea and even name of township is frequently, at the present day, sunk in that of the parish; and all business that is not manorial is dispatched in vestry meetings, which are however primarily meetings of the township for church purposes." 2 In this way the tun as the manor, ish. 1 "The middle colonies gravitated towards the form of government that obtained in New England or Virginia, as proximity to the one or the other dictated, while the local organization of the Carolinas was of a mixed char acter such as would naturally have been produced by the manner of their settlement."- "Town and County Gov ernment," Channing, J. H. Studies, zd series, X. p. 8. 2 Stubbs, Const. Hist., vol. i. p. 85. moot had ceased to exist as a single assembly, and its jurisdiction had been split up and absorbed by the parish vestry and manorial courts long before the emigration to America began. It is therefore a remarkable fact, but one perfectly susceptible of explanation, that when the settlers of New England reproduced the township in the new world, they should have reproduced it in its original integrity, unfettered by the feudal and ecclesiastical restraints by which it had been hampered for centuries. As a brilliant American scholar Mr. Fiske's has expressed it, the colonists "were severed now from church statement. and from aristocracy. So they had but to discard the ecclesiastical and lordly terminology, with such limitations as they involved, and reintegrate the separate jurisdictions into one, and forthwith the old assembly of the township, founded in immemorial tradition, but revivified by new thoughts and purposes gained through ages of political training, emerged into fresh life and entered upon a more glorious career.' "'1 In this way the village community common to the whole Aryan world, which appeared in Britain as the "tun" or township, where it became involved in both feudal and ecclesiastical relations, finally reappeared in its primitive simplicity upon the soil of New England, and there became the active unit of well organized system of local self-government. The govern- The town ment of the New England town, like that of the Old-English meeting. township, is vested in the town meeting 2 (tun-moot) as a single assembly in which every adult male residing within the township is expected to be present and to vote. When an examination is made of the manner in which a New England town was formed by men bound together by community of thought and purpose, or by previous neighborhood; of the manner in which the townsmen vested the town administration in a body of selectmen; of the manner in which the early proprietors held the lands which they parcelled out among themselves, reserving, to the exclusion of after-comers, certain portions for common pasture and certain portions for common tillage; of the manner in which the town regulated the herd 49. 1 John Fiske, Am. Political Ideas, p. 2 "A New England town-meeting is essentially the same thing as the Homeric ἀγορή, the Athenian ἐκκλησία, the Roman comitia, the Swiss Landes- |