Some merits of the town meeting.
The “magic fund” delusion.
Within its proper sphere, government by town meeting is the form of government most effectively under watch and control. Everything is done in the full daylight of publicity. The specific objects for which public money is to be appropriated are discussed in the presence of everybody, and any one who disapproves of any of these objects, or of the way in which it is proposed to obtain it, has an opportunity to declare his opinions. Under this form of government people are not so liable to bewildering delusions as under other forms. I refer especially to the delusion that “the Government” is a sort of mysterious power, possessed of a magic inexhaustible fund of wealth, and able to do all manner of things for the benefit of “the People.” Some such notion as this, more often implied than expressed, is very common, and it is inexpressibly dear to demagogues. It is the prolific root from which springs that luxuriant crop of humbug upon which political tricksters thrive as pigs fatten upon corn. In point of fact no such government, armed with a magic fund of its own, has ever existed upon the earth. No government has ever yet used any money for public purposes which it did not first take from its own people,—unless when it may have plundered it from some other people in victorious warfare.
The inhabitant of a New England town is perpetually reminded that “the Government” is “the People.” Although he may think loosely about the government of his state or the still more remote government at Washington, he is kept pretty close to the facts where local affairs are concerned, and in this there is a political training of no small value.
Educational value of the town meeting.
In the kind of discussion which it provokes, in the necessity of facing argument with argument and of keeping one’s temper under control, the town meeting is the best political training school in existence. Its educational value is far higher than that of the newspaper, which, in spite of its many merits as a diffuser of information, is very apt to do its best to bemuddle and sophisticate plain facts. The period when town meetings were most important from the wide scope of their transactions was the period of earnest and sometimes stormy discussion that ushered in our Revolutionary War. In those days great principles of government were discussed with a wealth of knowledge and stated with masterly skill in town meeting.
Primogeniture and entail in Virginia.
In Virginia the economic circumstances were very different from those of New England, and the effects were seen in a different kind of local institutions. In New England the system of small holdings facilitated the change from primogeniture to the Kentish custom of gavelkind, with which many of the settlers were already familiar, in which the property of an intestate is equally divided among the children.[24] In Virginia, on the other hand, the large estates, cultivated by servile labour, were kept together by the combined customs of primogeniture and entail, which lasted until they were overthrown by Thomas Jefferson in 1776. In this circumstance, more than in anything else, originated the more aristocratic features in the local institutions of Virginia. To this should be added the facts that before the eighteenth century there was a large servile class of whites, to which there was nothing even remotely analogous in New England; and that the introduction of negro slavery, which was beginning to assume noticeable dimensions about 1670, served to affix a stigma upon manual labour.
Virginia parishes.