American school-house was written long ago
by Whittier, in describing Joshua Coffin's school under the big elm on
the cross-road in East Haverhill; its humor and pathos and drama have
been portrayed by innumerable story-writers and essayists. Mrs. Martha
Baker Dunn's charming sketches, entitled "Cicero in Maine" and "Virgil
in Maine," indicate the idealism once taught in the old rural
academies,--and it is taught there still. City men will stop wistfully
on the street, in the first week of September, to watch the boys and
girls go trudging off to their first day of school; men who believe in
nothing else at least believe in that! And school and college and
university remain, as in the beginning, the first garden-ground and the
last refuge of literature.

That "town-meeting" which John Adams thought Virginia might do well to
adopt has likewise become a symbol of American idealism. Together with
the training-day, it represented the rights and duties and privileges
of free men; the machinery of self-government. It was democracy, rather
than "representative" government, under its purest aspect. Sentiments
of responsibility to the town, the political unit, and to the
Commonwealth, the group of units, were bred there. Likewise, it was a
training-school for sententious speech and weighty action; its roots,
as historians love to demonstrate, run back very far; and though the
modern drift to cities has made its machinery ineffective in the larger
communities, it remains a perpetual spring or feeding stream to the
broader currents of our national life. Without an understanding of the
town-meeting and its equivalents, our political literature loses much
of its significance. Like the school-house and meeting-house, it has
become glorified by our men of letters. John Fiske and other historians
have celebrated it in some of the most brilliant pages of our political
writing; and that citizen literature, so deeply characteristic of us,
found in the plain, forthright, and public-spirited tone of
town-meeting discussions its keynote. The spectacular debates of our
national history, the dramatic contests in the great arena of the
Senate Chamber, the discussions before huge popular audiences in the
West, have maintained the civic point of view, have developed and
dignified and enriched the prose style first employed by American
freemen in deciding their local affairs in the presence of their
neighbors. "I am a part of this people," said Li