d constrain them to
any sacrifices needful for realizing their high ideal of life. They gave
up pleasant homes in England, and they left them with no feeling of
rancour towards their native land, in order that, by dint of whatever
hardship, they might establish in the American wilderness what should
approve itself to their judgment as a god-fearing community. It matters
little that their conceptions were in some respects narrow. In the
unflinching adherence to duty which prompted their enterprise, and in
the sober intelligence with which it was carried out, we have, as I said
before, the key to what is best in the history of the American people.

Out of such a colonization as that here described nothing but a
democratic society could very well come, save perhaps in case of a
scarcity of arable land. Between the country gentleman and the yeoman
who has become a landed proprietor, the difference is not great enough
to allow the establishment of permanent distinctions, social or
political. Immediately on their arrival in New England, the settlers
proceeded to form for themselves a government as purely democratic as
any that has ever been seen in the world. Instead of scattering about
over the country, the requirements of education and of public worship,
as well as of defence against Indian attacks, obliged them to form small
village communities. As these villages multiplied, the surface of the
country came to be laid out in small districts (usually from six to ten
miles in length and breadth) called _townships_. Each township contained
its village together with the woodlands surrounding it. In later days
two or more villages have often grown up within the limits of the same
township, and the road from one village to another is sometimes bordered
with homesteads and cultivated fields throughout nearly its whole
length. In the neighbourhood of Boston villages and small towns crowd
closely together for twenty miles in every direction; and all these will
no doubt by and by grow together into a vast and complicated city, in
somewhat the same way that London has grown.

From the outset the government of the township was vested in the
TOWN-MEETING,--an institution which in its present form is said to be
peculiar to New England, but which, as we shall see, has close analogies
with local self-governing bodies in other ages and countries. Once in
each year--usually in the month of March--a meeting is held, at which
every adult male