than scattered plantations; and this
doubtless helped to keep people together, although if there had been
any strong inducement for solitary pioneers to plunge into the great
woods, as in later years so often happened at the West, it is not
likely that any dread of the savages would have hindered them.

[Sidenote: Township and village.]
[Sidenote: Social positions of settlers.]
Thus the early settlers of New England came to live in townships. A
township would consist of about as many farms as could be disposed
within convenient distance from the meeting-house, where all the
inhabitants, young and old, gathered every Sunday, coming on horseback
or afoot. The meeting-house was thus centrally situated, and near
it was the town pasture or "common," with the school-house and the
block-house, or rude fortress for defence against the Indians. For the
latter building some commanding position was apt to be selected, and
hence we so often find the old village streets of New England running
along elevated ridges or climbing over beetling hilltops. Around the
meeting-house and common the dwellings gradually clustered into a
village, and after a while the tavern, store, and town-house made
their appearance.

Among the people who thus tilled the farms and built up the villages of
New England, the differences in what we should call social position,
though noticeable, were not extreme. While in England some had been
esquires or country magistrates, or "lords of the manor,"--a phrase
which does not mean a member of the peerage, but a landed proprietor
with dependent tenants[1]; some had been yeomen, or persons holding
farms by some free kind of tenure; some had been artisans or tradesmen
in cities. All had for many generations been more or less accustomed to
self-government and to public meetings for discussing local affairs.
That self-government, especially as far as church matters were
concerned, they were stoutly bent upon maintaining and extending.
Indeed, that was what they had crossed the ocean for. Under these
circumstances they developed a kind of government which we may describe
in the present tense, for its methods are pretty much the same to-day
that they were two centuries ago.

[Footnote 1: Compare the Scottish "laird."]

[Sidenote: The town-meeting.]
In a New England township the people directly govern themselves; the
government is the people, or, to speak with entire precision, it is
all the male inhabitants of one