Yet evidences of anything like regular meetings of the parishioners are, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, so scanty as to leave considerable doubt as to whether they occurred at all generally. They are not mentioned in the legal text-books of the time, which were, of course, written by men who looked from above downward and were not interested in local institutions as such. A few accounts of such vestry meetings remain, [Footnote: E.g., those of Steeple Ashton, quoted in Toulmin Smith, The Parish, chap, vii, SS 12.] but the action taken at them was apparently restricted to the choice of parish officers, the adoption of by-laws for the carrying out of necessary taxation and other distribution of burdens, and for matters connected with the building or repair of the church. The attendance probably consisted only of the more substantial members of the parish and of those who held office and must present reports. The parish life resided more in the activity of its officials than of its assembly. Vigorous local self-government could not have existed without leaving more distinct traces than it has done, and our study of the political system of the time will have made it clear that much local independence was not suited to the period of the Tudors and Stuarts. [Footnote: See Toulmin Smith, The Parish, chaps, ii., iv., vii.; and Gneist, Self-Government, book III., chap, ix., S 115.] Such was the provision for the carrying out of those matters of local concern in the county, the hundred, and rural parish which were not performed by immediate officials or commissioners of the central government. It is evident that in the early seventeenth century the motive power for almost all government, local as well as general, emanated from the national government—from the king, Privy Council, and Parliament. It was a vigorous, assertive, centralized administration, eager to carry out its will and enforce order, uniformity, and its own ideas upon all persons and bodies in England. No shade of doubt of their own wisdom or reluctance to override local or individual liberty of action troubled the thought or weakened the resolution of the Tudor and Stuart sovereigns and their ministers. Nor were their Parliaments antagonistic to the principle of centralized government, even when they wished to curb unrestrained royal control of it. Strong government was in entire consonance with the spirit of the time.
Yet this ambitious central government was working with very inadequate and unsuitable instruments. Instead of a body of efficient and responsible officials, directly and immediately dependent upon their superiors, receiving wages and hoping for promotion, such as successful centralized governments have usually possessed, the king and council made use of the old and cumbrous machinery of local self-government as they found it. It was quite unsuited to their purposes. Sheriffs, coroners, high and petty constables, church-wardens, even justices of the peace, had come down from a period when government was of quite another and more primitive character, in which the central power counted for far less, local powers for far more. Most of the local officials were unpaid, and the others were dependent on insignificant fees for such money reward as they obtained. The labors imposed upon them were performed only from a sense of duty, loyalty, or necessity, not as a fair return for remuneration received.
There was little provision for a wise selection of office-holders, so far as regarded their suitability to the objects of the central administration. The county and hundred officials were taken from one restricted class, the rural gentry; the township and parish officials were chosen by their neighbors from their own number. In a word, the government of Elizabeth, James, and Charles was trying to carry on an ambitious, centralized administration by means of an unpaid, untrained, and carelessly selected group of local officials, whose offices had been established and whose characters had been formed for a system of much more limited powers and of more independent local life.
At certain times, as in the period of personal government of Charles I., something like a hierarchy seemed about to develop itself, in which the Privy Council, speaking in the name of the king, gave instructions to the justices of assize, the justices of assize to the sheriffs and justices of the peace, the justices of the peace to the high-constable of the hundred, and the high-constable to the petty constable, church- wardens, and other township or parish officials. But no such regularity was attained; the council frequently communicated directly with the justices of the peace, the sheriff with the parish officers; and the administration became no more systematic as time went on.
The primary governmental division of the country, the shire, was the sphere of much activity; but it was not automatic, and acted wholly or almost wholly in response to pressure from above. The ultimate unit of local government, the parish, township, or manor, had many and interesting functions, but they were for the most part either declining survivals of earlier powers, or new forms of activity imposed upon it from above. It had the necessary officials and the political rights to enable it to do a great deal, but it showed few signs of vigorous life. Thus government in England in the early seventeenth century was so organized that at the top was an energetic national government, midway an active but dependent county organization, and at the bottom the parish with a residuum of ancient but unutilized powers of self- government.
No greater contrast could be noted in the position of men than that between the Englishman at home, in the early seventeenth century, and the Englishman who emigrated to America. Almost all the conditions that surrounded the former were reversed in the case of the latter. The pressure of central government was immediately and almost completely withdrawn. Many of the most urgent activities of government in England, such as the administration of the poor law and the restriction of vagabondage, almost ceased in the colonies. The class of settled rural gentry from which most local officials were drawn in England did not exist in America. On the other hand, the wilderness, the Indians, the freedom from restraint, the religious liberty, the opportunity for economic and social rise in the New World made a set of conditions which had been quite unknown in the mother-country.
As a result, the colonists had to make a choice from among the institutions with which they were familiar at home, of those which were applicable to their new needs. Of such institutions of local government in England there were, as has been seen, a considerable number and variety. Naturally, some functions which had been prominent at home were reduced to insignificance in the colonies; some which had been almost forgotten or had remained quite undeveloped in England gained unwonted importance in America. Almost every local official or body which existed in England reappeared in some part or other of the English colonies, although often with much altered powers and duties. All the familiar names are to be found, though sometimes with new meanings and always more or less considerably adapted to new conditions. Moreover, the choice was in the main restricted to familiar English institutions, for in the great variety of system in different parts of the colonies there was scarcely an official or body which did not have its prototype in England. [Footnote: Howard, Local Constitutional History of the U. S.; Channing, Town and County Government in the English Colonies; Adams, Germanic Origin of New England Towns. Cf. also Tyler, England in America; Andrews, Colonial Self-Government; Greene, Colonial Commonwealth (American Nation Series), IV., V., VI.]
In this as in other matters, the foundations of America were laid in European conditions and occurrences. European needs sent explorers on their voyages of discovery, and European ambitions equipped adventurers for their expeditions of conquest; the commercial projects of England, France, Holland, and Sweden led to the establishment of the principal New-World colonies; the economic exigencies and the political and religious struggles of Europe sent a flood of settlers to people them; the institutions of Spain, France, Holland, and England all found a lodgment in the western continent; and those of England became the basis of the great nation which has reached so distinct a primacy in America.