tates where it first grew up and
has since chiefly flourished. But something very like the "town-meeting
principle" lies at the bottom of all the political life of the United
States. To maintain vitality in the centre without sacrificing it in the
parts; to preserve tranquillity in the mutual relations of forty
powerful states, while keeping the people everywhere as far as possible
in direct contact with the government; such is the political problem
which the American Union exists for the purpose of solving; and of this
great truth every American citizen is supposed to have some glimmering,
however crude.

It has been said that the town-governments of New England were
established without any conscious reference to precedent; but, however
this may be, they are certainly not without precedents and analogies, to
enumerate which will carry us very far back in the history of the Aryan
world. At the beginning of his essay on the "Growth of the English
Constitution," Mr. Freeman gives an eloquent account of the May
assemblies of Uri and Appenzell, when the whole people elect their
magistrates for the year and vote upon amendments to the old laws or
upon the adoption of new ones. Such a sight Mr. Freeman seems to think
can be seen nowhere but in Switzerland, and he reckons it among the
highest privileges of his life to have looked upon it. But I am unable
to see in what respect the town-meeting in Massachusetts differs from
the _Landesgemeinde_ or cantonal assembly in Switzerland, save that it
is held in a town-hall and not in the open air, that it is conducted
with somewhat less of pageantry, and that the freemen who attend do not
carry arms even by way of ceremony. In the Swiss assembly, as Mr.
Freeman truly observes, we see exemplified the most democratic phase of
the old Teutonic constitution as described in the "Germania" of
Tacitus, "the earliest picture which history can give us of the
political and social being of our own forefathers." The same remark, in
precisely the same terms, would be true of the town-meetings of New
England. Political institutions, on the White Mountains and on the Alps,
not only closely resemble each other, but are connected by strict bonds
of descent from a common original.

The most primitive self-governing body of which we have any knowledge is
the village-community of the ancient Teutons, of which such strict
counterparts are found in other parts of the Aryan world as to make it
apparent th