154 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences^ Arts and Lette);s. 



monwealtli, which remind one, by the variety and minuteness of theii* 

 functions, of those of the New England towns: for example, the hiring of 

 preachers and teachers, as well as the care of roads, the supervision of 

 markets, etc. The "Great Court" of Ipswich, consisting of "aU the free- 

 men, Portmen, Aldermen and Baihffs," corresponds very closely to the New 

 England town-meeting. The most characteristic feature of the New Eng- 

 land town-meeting is, however, wanting — the requirement that the 

 magistrates assume no control of the assembly, but retire into a private 

 station, as it were, for the occasion; the meeting electing its own chairman, 

 and exercising aiithority as a self-governing democracy. In most popular 

 assemblies the magistrates are the presiding officers: in the EngKsh 

 " vestry" or parish-meeting it is the parson, in the Great Court of Ipswich, 

 one of the bailiffs. This feature of the New England town meeting, which, 

 with others, it shares with the higher parliamentary bodies, may perhaps 

 be claimed as another mstance of the survival in America of usages or 

 institutions which have become extinct in the mother country. Gneist 

 says (p. 202): " The meeting was summoned by the churchwardens; the 

 cha'ir was regularly taken by the parson, as the landlord of the vestry, and 

 the first member of the ecclesiastical iiarish, as a matter of courtesy, but a 

 positive right of presiding could be established neither by precedent nor by 

 analogy. In analogy -with, the tax-granting commoners, the meeting Mras 

 rather regarded as its own master, in respect to the appointment of a 

 chairman, as well as in respect to its adjournment. The voting was con- 

 ducted with equal rights for each individual, after the manner of the old 

 courts leet, the parliamentary elections, and the parliamentary resolutions. 

 The mode of giving the vote was, as a rule, by show of hands, but in dif- 

 ficult and doubtful cases, by a poll." 



My thesis, that the Enghsh to^vns of the middle ages were an integral 

 part of the constitutional machinery, and not mere corporations, hke the 

 corresponding bodies of Germany, I have attemj^ted to prove by showing: 

 first, their territorial character, as conterminous areas of land, embracing 

 the entire 'country; secondly, their practice of self-government in local 

 concerns, and their organic relation to the larger representative bodies. 

 We have seen that in the sixteenth century, at which time the parish be- 

 came the organ of local self-government, the terms totvn and parish were 

 used indifferently for the same institutions; and that in the seventeenth 

 century, when the American colonies were planted, the colonists carried 

 with them a toiv7i-system essentially the same as the parish-system which 

 continued in England. The analogy with German institutions is mislead- 

 ing. The English people developed the institution of the "town" upon 

 their own soil; and it is to be compared, not with the imperfect creation 

 of the continental Gerraans, from which it was perhaps derived, but with 

 the matvired institution of New England, to which it gave birth. 



