The unit of the social organism is not the town, for there
are no towns; it is the plantation. In a population thus dispersed over
vast tracts of territory, schools and churches are maintained with
difficulty, or not maintained at all. Systems of primary and secondary
schools are impracticable, and, for want of these, institutions of
higher education either languish or are never begun. A consequent
tendency, which, happily, there were many influences to resist, was for
this townless population to settle down into the condition of those who,
in distinction from the early Christians, came to be called _pagani_, or
"men of the hamlets," and _Heiden_, or "men of the heath."

Another common characteristic of the four Southern colonies is that
upon them all was imposed by foreign power a church establishment not
acceptable to the people. In the Carolinas the attempted establishment
of the English church was an absolute failure. It was a church (with
slight exceptions) without parishes, without services, without clergy,
without people, but with certain pretensions in law which were
hindrances in the way of other Christian work, and which tended to make
itself generally odious. In the two older colonies the Established
Church was worse than a failure. It had endowments, parsonages, glebes,
salaries raised by public tax, and therefore it had a clergy--and _such_
a clergy! Transferring to America the most shameful faults of the
English Establishment, it gave the sacred offices of the Christian
ministry by "patronage" into the hands of debauched and corrupt
adventurers, whose character in general was below the not very lofty
standard of the people whom they pretended to serve in the name of Jesus
Christ. Both in Virginia and in Maryland the infliction of this rabble
of simonists as a burden upon the public treasury was a nuisance under
which the people grew more and more restive from year to year. There was
no spiritual discipline to which this _pretraille_ was amenable.[148:1]
It was the constant effort of good citizens, in the legislature and in
the vestries, if not to starve out the vermin, at least to hold them in
some sort of subjection to the power of the purse. The struggle was one
of the antecedents of the War of Independence, and the vestries of the
Virginia parishes, with their combined ecclesiastical and civil
functions, became a training-school for some of the statesmen of the
Revolution.

In the general dereliction