The towns created it, compose it, send up to it its heart-and-life
blood. This it is which makes the New England town unique, attracting
the attention and interest of intelligent foreigners who visit our
shores. Judge Parker says: "I very well recollect the curiosity
expressed by some of the gentlemen in the suite of Lafayette, on his
visit to this country in 1825, respecting these town organizations and
their powers and operations." In the same connection he adds that "a
careful examination of the history of the New England towns will show
that," instead of being modeled after the town of our Anglo-Saxon
ancestors, or the free cities of the continent of the twelfth century,
"they were not founded or modeled on precedent" at all. Mr. E.A.
Freeman, however, puts it more truthfully in saying: "The circumstances
of New England called the primitive assembly (that is, the Homeric
agora, Athenian ekklesia, Roman comitia, Swiss landesgemeinde, English
folk-moot) again into being, when in the older England it was well-nigh
forgotten. What in Switzerland was a _sur_vival was in New England
rather a _re_vival."[A]

[Footnote A: Introduction to American Institutional History, Johns
Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science.]

Our New England town-house, therefore, is a symbol of institutions,
partly original with our fathers, partly a priceless inheritance from
Old England the land of our fathers, and nearly in the whole, if not
quite, a regermination and new growth of old race instincts and
practices on a new soil.

The New England town is not an institution of all the States, but its
principle has invaded the majority. To the West and Northwest it has
been carried by the New Englander himself, and is being carried by him
both directly and indirectly into the South and Southwest, and will show
there in no great length of time its prevailing and vitalizing power.

It was Jefferson, himself a Virginian, reared in the midst of another
system, aristocratical and central in its character, who said: "These
wards, called townships in New England, are the vital principle of their
governments, and have proved themselves the wisest invention ever
devised by the wit of man for the perfect exercise of self-government
and for its preservation."

The New England town-house, therefore, is significant of more than its
predecessor in England or Germany. While with them it means freedom in
the management of local affairs,