edful of the warning which I find in the
preface of a certain popular text-book, that "to learn the duties of
town, city, and county officers, has nothing whatever to do with the
grand and noble subject of Civil Government," and that "to attempt
class drill on petty town and county offices, would be simply
burlesque of the whole subject." But, suppose one were to say, with
an air of ineffable scorn, that petty experiments on terrestrial
gravitation and radiant heat, such as can be made with commonplace
pendulums and tea-kettles, have nothing whatever to do with the grand
and noble subject of Physical Astronomy! Science would not have got
very far on that plan, I fancy. The truth is, that science, while it
is perpetually dealing with questions of magnitude, and knows very
well what is large and what is small, knows nothing whatever of any
such distinction as that between things that are "grand" and things
that are "petty." When we try to study things in a scientific spirit,
to learn their modes of genesis and their present aspects, in order
that we may foresee their tendencies, and make our volitions count
for something in modifying them, there is nothing which we may safely
disregard as trivial. This is true of whatever we can study; it is
eminently true of the history of institutions. Government is not a
royal mystery, to be shut off, like old Deiokes,[2] by a sevenfold
wall from the ordinary business of life. Questions of civil government
are practical business questions, the principles of which are as often
and as forcibly illustrated in a city council or a county board of
supervisors, as in the House of Representatives at Washington. It is
partly because too many of our citizens fail to realize that local
government is a worthy study, that we find it making so much trouble
for us. The "bummers" and "boodlers" do not find the subject beneath
their notice; the Master who inspires them is wide awake and--for a
creature that divides the hoof--extremely intelligent.

[Footnote 2: Herodotus, i. 98.]

It is, moreover, the mental training gained through contact with
local government that enables the people of a community to conduct
successfully, through their representatives, the government of the
state and the nation. And so it makes a great deal of difference
whether the government of a town or county is of one sort or another.
If the average character of our local governments for the past quarter
of a century had been