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axes, appointed the churchwardens, presented the minister for induction into office, and acted as overseers of the poor. The minister presided in all vestry meetings. His salary was paid in tobacco, and in 1696 it was fixed by law at 16,000 pounds of tobacco yearly. In many parishes the churchwardens were the collectors of the parish taxes. The other officers, such as the sexton and the parish clerk, were appointed either by the minister or by the vestry. With the local government thus administered, we see that the larger part of the people had little directly to do. Nevertheless in these small neighbourhoods government was in full sight of the people. Its proceedings went on in broad daylight and were sustained by public sentiment. As Jefferson said, "The vestrymen are usually the most discreet farmers, so distributed through the parish that every part of it may be under the immediate eye of some one of them. They are well acquainted with the details and economy of private life, and they find sufficient inducements to execute their charge well, in their philanthropy, in the approbation of their neighbours, and the distinction which that gives them." [8] [Footnote 8: See Howard, _Local Constitutional History of the United States_, vol. i. p. 122.] [Sidenote: The county was the unit of representation.] The difference, however, between the New England township and the Virginia parish, in respect of self-government, was striking enough. We have now to note a further difference. In New England, as we have seen, the township was the unit of representation in the colonial legislature; but in Virginia the parish was not the unit of representation. The county was that unit. In the colonial legislature of Virginia the representatives sat not for parishes, but for counties. The difference is very significant. As the political life of New England was in a manner built up out of the political life of the towns, so the political life of Virginia was built up out of the political life of the counties. This was partly because the vast plantations were not grouped about a compact village nucleus like the small farms at the North, and partly because there was not in Virginia that Puritan theory of the church according to which each congregation is a self-governing democracy. The conditions which made the New England town-meeting were absent. The only alternative was some kind of representative government, and for this the county w
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