Resolved, That capital punishment is not justifiable.
References.—Dole's Talks about Law; Lieber's Civil Liberty and Self Government, 234-6; The Century, November 1882; Atlantic Monthly, July 1881; North American Review, March 1882 and July 1884.
[Illustration: Papers—Prepare with care the "tabular views" of the town, village, city and county, as follows]
CHAPTER VIII.
HISTORICAL.
Old England.—Not only our language but also very many of our political institutions we have inherited from England. But the country now called by that name is not the real old England. The fatherland of the English race is the isthmus in the northern part of Germany which we now call Schleswig. Here dwelt the old Angles or English. To the north of them in Jutland was the tribe called the Jutes, and to the south of them, in what we now call Holstein and Friesland, dwelt the Saxons. "How close was the union of these tribes was shown by their use of a common name, while the choice of this name points out the tribe which at the moment when we first meet them, in the fifth century, must have been the most powerful in the confederacy." [Footnote: Green's History of the English People.] Among themselves they bore in common the name of Englishmen.
Among the characteristics of those German ancestors of ours are the following: They were very independent; the free landholder was "the free-necked man." The ties of kinship were very strong. "Each kinsman was his kinsman's keeper, bound to protect him from wrong, to hinder him from wrong-doing, and to suffer with and pay for him if wrong were done." [Footnote: Green's History of the English People.] They were very much attached to home. "Land with the German race seems everywhere to have been the accompaniment of full freedom…. The landless man ceased for all practical purposes to be free, though he was no man's slave." [Footnote: Green's History of the English People.] Among themselves they were quite social. Though tillers of the soil they lived, not isolated, but grouped together in small villages. This may have been partly for mutual protection. They were lovers of law and order.
The Township.[Footnote: See American Political Ideas, pp. 31-63.]—The derivation of the word "township" shows us to whom we are indebted for the institution itself. The word is derived from the Anglo-Saxon tun-scipe. Tun meant hedge, ditch or defense; and scipe, which we have also in landscape, meant what may be seen. Around the village before mentioned was the tun, and beyond were the fields and meadows and woodlands, the whole forming the tun scipe or township.
To administer justice and to take any other action for the common good, the freemen gathered in folk-moot around the moot hill or the sacred tree.
Though the proceedings of these assemblies differed in detail from those of our town meetings, both contain the great principle of local self government.