omes
impracticable in a large community, so when the population of a township
has grown to ten or twelve thousand, the town-meeting is discontinued,
the town is incorporated as a city, and its affairs are managed by a
mayor, a board of aldermen, and a common council, according to the
system adopted in London in the reign of Edward I. In America,
therefore, the distinction between cities and towns has nothing to do
with the presence or absence of a cathedral, but refers solely to
differences in the communal or municipal government. In the city the
common council, as a representative body, replaces (in a certain sense)
the town-meeting; a representative government is substituted for a pure
democracy. But the city officers, like the selectmen of towns, are
elected annually; and in no case (I believe) has municipal government
fallen into the hands of a self-perpetuating body, as it has done in so
many instances in England owing to the unwise policy pursued by the
Tudors and Stuarts in their grants of charters.

It is only in New England that the township system is to be found in its
completeness. In several southern and western states the administrative
unit is the county, and local affairs are managed by county
commissioners elected by the people. Elsewhere we find a mixture of the
county and township systems. In some of the western states settled by
New England people, town-meetings are held, though their powers are
somewhat less extensive than in New England. In the settlement of
Virginia it was attempted to copy directly the parishes and vestries,
boroughs and guilds of England. But in the southern states generally the
great size of the plantations and the wide dispersion of the population
hindered the growth of towns, so that it was impossible to have an
administrative unit smaller than the county. As Tocqueville said fifty
years ago, "the farther south we go the less active does the business of
the township or parish become; the population exercises a less immediate
influence on affairs; the power of the elected magistrate is augmented
and that of the election diminished, while the public spirit of the
local communities is less quickly awakened and less influential." This
is almost equally true to-day; yet with all these differences in local
organization, there is no part of our country in which the spirit of
local self-government can be called weak or uncertain. I have described
the Town-meeting as it exists in the s