CHAPTER XLVIII

LOCAL GOVERNMENT

THIS is the place for an account of local government in the United States, because it is a matter regulated not by Federal law but by the several States and Territories, each of which establishes such local authorities, rural and urban, as the people of the State or Territory desire, and invests them with the requisite powers. But this very fact indicates the immensity of the subject. Each State has its own system of local areas and authorities, created and worked under its own laws; and though these systems agree in many points, they differ in so many others, that a whole volume would be needed to give even a summary view of their peculiarities. All I can here attempt is to distinguish the leading types of local government to be found in the United States, to describe the prominent features of each type, and to explain the influence which the large scope and popular character of local administration exercise upon the general life and well-being of the American people.

Three types of rural local government are discernible in America. The first is characterized by its unit, the Town or Township, and exists in the six New England States. The second is characterized by a much larger unit, the county, and prevails in the Southern States. The third combines some features of the first with some of the second, and may be called the mixed system. It is found, under a considerable variety of forms, in the Middle and North-western States. The differences of these three types are interesting, not only because of the practical instruction they afford, but also because they spring from original differences in the character of the colonists who settled along the American coast, and in the conditions under which the communities there founded were developed.

The first New England settlers were Puritans in religion, and sometimes inclined to republicanism in politics. They were largely townsfolk, accustomed to municipal life and to vestry

meetings. They planted their tiny communities along the sea-shore and the banks of rivers, enclosing them with stockades for protection against the warlike Indians. Each was obliged to be self-sufficing, because divided by rocks and woods from the others. Each had its common pasture on which the inhabitants turned out their cattle, and which officers were elected to manage. Each was a religious as well as a civil body politic, gathered round the church as its centre; and the equality which prevailed in the congregation prevailed also in civil affairs, the whole community meeting under a president or Moderator to discuss affairs of common interest. Each such settlement was called a Town, or Township, and was in fact a miniature commonwealth, exercising a practical sovereignty over the property and persons of its members, for there was as yet no State, and the distant home government scarcely cared to interfere, but exercising it on thoroughly democratic principles. Its centre was a group of dwellings, often surrounded by a fence or wall, but it included a rural area of several square miles, over which farmhouses and hamlets began to spring up when the Indians retired. The name "town" covered the whole of this area, which was never too large for all the inhabitants to come together to a central place of meeting. This town organization remained strong and close, the colonists being men of narrow means, and held together in each settlement by the needs of defence. And though presently the towns became aggregated into counties, and the legislature and governor, first of the whole colony, and, after 1776, of the State, began to exert their superior authority, the towns (which, be it remembered, remained rural communities, making up the whole area of the State) held their ground, and are to this day the true units of political life in New England, the solid foundation of that well-compacted structure of self-government which European philosophers have admired and the new States of the West have sought to reproduce. Till 1821 the towns were the only political corporate bodies in Massachusetts, and till 1857 they formed, as they still form in

1 Boston continued to be a town governed by a primary assembly of all citizens till 1822; and even then the town-meeting was not quite abolished, for a provision was introduced, intended to satisfy conservative democratic feeling, into the city charter granted by statute in that year, empowering the mayor and aldermen to call general meetings of the citizens qualified to vote in city affairs "to consult upon the common good, to give instructions to their representatives, and to take all lawful means to obtain a redress of any grievances." Such primary assemblies are, however, never now convoked.

Connecticut, the basis of representation in her Assembly, each town, however small, returning at least one member. Not a little of that robust, if somewhat narrow, localism which characterizes the representative system of America is due to this originally distinct and self-sufficing corporate life of the seventeenth century towns. Nor is it without interest to observe that although they owed much to the conditions which surrounded the early colonists, forcing them to develop a civic patriotism resembling that of the republics of ancient Greece and Italy, they owed something also to those Teutonic traditions of semi-independent local communities, owning common property, and governing themselves by a primary assembly of all free inhabitants, which the English had brought with them from the Elbe and the Weser, and which, though already decaying, had been to some extent perpetuated in the practice of many parts of England, down till the days of the Stuart kings.

Very different were the circumstances of the Southern colonies. The men who went to Virginia and the Carolinas were not Puritans, nor did they mostly go in families and groups of families from the same neighbourhood. Many were casual adventurers, often belonging to the upper class, Episcopalians in religion, and with no such experience of, or attachment to, local self-government as the men of Massachusetts or Connecticut. They settled in a region where the Indian tribes were comparatively peaceable, and where therefore there was little need of concentration for the purposes of defence. The climate along the coast was thought somewhat too hot for European labour, and such labour was scarce, so slaves were imported to cultivate the land. Population was thinly scattered; estates were large; the soil was fertile and soon enriched its owners. Thus a semi-feudal society grew up, in which authority naturally fell to the land owners, each of whom was the centre of a group of free dependants as well as the master of an increasing crowd of slaves. There were, therefore, comparatively few urban communities, and the life of the colony took a rural type. The houses of the planters lay miles apart from one another; and when local divisions had to be created, these were made large enough to include a considerable area of territory and number of land-owning gentlemen. They were therefore rural divisions, counties framed on the model of English counties. Smaller circumscriptions there were, such as hundreds and par

ishes, but the hundred died out, the parish ultimately became a purely ecclesiastical division, and the parish vestry was restricted to ecclesiastical functions, while the county remained the practically important unit of local administration, the unit to which the various functions of government were aggregated, and which, itself controlling minor authorities, was controlled by the State government alone. The affairs of the county were usually managed by a board of elective commissioners, and not, like those of the New England towns, by a primary assembly; and in an aristocratic society the leading planters had of course a predominating influence. Hence this form of local government was not only less democratic, but less stimulating and educative than that which prevailed in the New England States. Nor was the Virginian county, though so much larger than the New England town, ever as important an organism over against the State. It may almost be said, that while a New England State is a combination of towns, a southern State is from the first an administrative as well as political whole, whose subdivisions, the counties, had never any truly independent life, but were and are mere subdivisions for the convenient dispatch of judicial and financial business.

In the middle States of the Union, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York, settled or conquered by Englishmen sometime later than New England, the town and town-meeting did not as a rule exist, and the county was the original basis of organization. But as there grew up no planting aristocracy like that of Virginia or the Carolinas, the course of events took in the middle States a different direction. As trade and manufactures grew, population became denser than in the South. New England influenced them, and influenced still more the newer commonwealths which arose in the North-west, such as Ohio and Michigan, into which the surplus population of the East poured. And the result of this influence is seen in the growth through the middle and western States of a mixed system,

1 In Maryland hundreds, which still exist in Delaware, were for a long time the chief administrative divisions. We hear there also of "baronies" and "townlands," as in Ireland; and Maryland is usually called a "province," while the other settlements are colonies. Among its judicial establishments there were courts of pypowdry (piè poudré) and "hustings."

The hundred is a division of small consequence in southern England, but in Lancashire it has some important duties. It repairs the bridges; it is liable for damage done in a riot; and it had its high constable.

which presents a sort of compromise between the County system of the older Middle States and the South and the Town system of the North-east. There are great differences between the arrangements in one or other of these middle and western States. But it may be said, speaking generally, that in them the county is relatively less important than in the southern States, the township less important than in New England. The county is perhaps to be regarded, at least in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, as the true unit, and the townships (for so they are usually called) as its subdivisions. But the townships are vigorous organisms, which largely restrict the functions of the county authority, and give to local government, especially in the North-west, a character generally similar to that which it wears in New England.

So much for the history of the subject; a history far more interesting in its details than will be supposed from the rough sketch to which limits of space restrict me. Let us now look at the actual constitution and working of the organs of local government in the three several regions mentioned, beginning with New England and the Town system. I will first set forth the dry but necessary outline, reserving comments for the following chapter.

The Town is in rural districts the smallest local circumscription. English readers must be reminded that it is a rural, not an urban community, and that the largest group of houses it contains may be only what would be called in England a hamlet or small village. Its area seldom exceeds five square miles; its population is usually small, averaging less than 3000, but occasionally ranges up to 13,000, and sometimes falls below 200.2 It is governed by an assembly of all qualified voters resident

1 The word Town, which I write with a capital when using it in the American sense, is the Icelandic tún, Anglo-Saxon tûn, German zaun, and seems originally to have meant a hedge, then a hedged or fenced plot or enclosure. In Scotland (where it is pronounced "toon") it still denotes the farmhouse and buildings; in Iceland the manured grass plot, enclosed within a low green bank or raised dyke, which surrounds the baer or farmhouse. In parts of eastern England the chief cluster of houses in a parish is still often called "the town." In the North of England, where the parishes are more frequently large than they are in the South, the civil divisions of a parish are called townships.

2 I find in Massachusetts (Census of 1910) one town (New Ashford) with only 92 inhabitants, and one (Brookline, a suburb of Boston) with 27,792, while Revere has 18,219. But both in this and other New England States most towns have a population of from 1200 to 2500.