the coroner, are also chosen by the people. The sheriff is everywhere in America the chief executive officer attached to the judicial machinery of the county.

In these Southern States there exist various local divisions smaller than the counties. Their names and their attributions vary from State to State, but they have no legislative authority like that of the town meeting of New England, and their officers have very limited powers, being for most purposes controlled by the county authorities. The most important local body is the school committee for each school district. In several States, such as Virginia and North Carolina, we now find townships, and the present tendency seems in these States to be towards the development of something resembling the New England town. It is a tendency which grows with the growth of population, with the progress of manufactures and of the middle and industrious working class occupied therein, and especially with the increased desire for education. The school, some one truly says, is becoming the nucleus of local self-government in the South now, as the church was in New England two centuries ago. Nowhere, however, has there appeared a primary assembly; while the representative local assembly is still in its infancy. Local authorities in the South, and in the States which, like Nevada and Oregon, may be said to have adopted the county system, are generally executive officers and nothing more.

The third type is less easy to characterize than either of the two preceding, and the forms under which it appears in the Middle and North-western States are even more various than those referable to the second type. Two features mark it. One is the importance and power of the county, which in the history of most of these States appears before any smaller division; the other is the activity of the township,' which has more independence and a larger range of competence than under the system of the South. Now of these two features the former is the more conspicuous in one group of States — Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa; the latter in another group-Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, the two Dakotas, the reason being that the New

1 Township is the term most frequently used outside New England: town in New England.

Englanders, who were often the largest and always the most intelligent and energetic element among the settlers in the more northern of these two State groups, carried with them their attachment to the town system and their sense of its value, and succeeded, though sometimes not without a struggle, in establishing it in the six great and prosperous commonwealths which form that group. On the other hand, while Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York had not (from the causes already stated) started with the town system, they never adopted it completely; while in Ohio and Indiana the influx of settlers from the slave States, as well as from New York and Pennsylvania, gave to the county an early preponderance, which it has since retained. The conflict of the New England element with the Southern element is best seen in Illinois, the northern half of which State was settled by men of New England blood, the southern half by pioneers from Kentucky and Tennessee. The latter, coming first, established the county system, but the New Englanders fought against it, and in the constitutional convention of 1848 carried a provision, embodied in the Constitution of that year, and repeated in the present Constitution of 1870, whereby any county may adopt a system of township organization "whenever the majority of the legal voters of the county voting at any general election shall so determine." Under this power four-fifths of the 102 counties have now adopted the township system.

The conspicuous feature of this system is the reappearance of the New England town meeting, though in a somewhat less primitive and at the same time less perfect form, because the township of the West is a more artificial organism than the rural town of Massachusetts or Rhode Island, where, until lately, everybody was of English blood, everybody knew everybody else, everybody was educated not only in book-learning, but in the traditions of self-government. However, such as it is, the Illinois and Michigan system is spreading.

In proportion to the extent in which a State has adopted the township system the county has tended to decline in importance. It is nevertheless of more consequence in the West than in New England. It has frequently an educational official who inspects the schools, and it raises a tax for aiding

schools in the poorer townships. It has duties, which are naturally more important in a new than in an old State, of laying out main roads and erecting bridges and other public works. And sometimes it has the oversight of township expenditure. The board of county commissioners consists in Michigan and Illinois of the supervisors of all the townships within the county; in Wisconsin and Minnesota the commissioners are directly chosen at a county election.

I pass to the mixed or compromise system as it appears in the other group of States, of which Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa may be taken as samples. In these States we find no town meeting. Their township may have greater or less power, but its members do not come together in a primary assembly; it elects its local officers, and acts only through and by them. In Ohio there are three township trustees with the entire charge of local affairs, a clerk and a treasurer. In Pennsylvania the township is governed by two or three supervisors, elected for three years, one each year, together with an assessor (for valuation purposes), a town clerk, three auditors, six school directors, elected for three years, two each year; and (where the poor are a township charge) two overseers of the poor. The supervisors may lay a rate on the township not exceeding one per cent on the valuation of the property within its limits for the repair of roads, highways, and bridges, and the overseers of the poor may, with the consent of two justices, levy a similar tax for the poor. But as the poor are usually a county charge, and as any ratepayer may work out his road tax in labour, township rates amount to very little.

CHAPTER XLVIII

OBSERVATIONS ON LOCAL GOVERNMENT

THE chief functions local government has to discharge in the United States may be summarized in a few paragraphs: Making and repairing Roads and Bridges. These prime necessities of rural life are provided for by the township, county, or State, according to the class to which a road or bridge belongs. That the roads of America are proverbially ill-built and ill-kept is due partly to the climate, with its alternations of severe frost, occasional torrential rains (in the Middle and Southern States), and long droughts; partly to the hasty habits of the people, who are too busy with other things, and too eager to use their capital in private enterprises to be willing to spend freely on highways; partly also to the thinness of population, which is, except in a few manufacturing districts, much less dense than in Western Europe. In many districts railways have come before roads, so roads have been the less used and cared for.

The administration of justice was one of the first needs which caused the formation of the county: and matters connected with it still form a large part of county business. The voters elect a judge or judges, and the local prosecuting officer, called the district attorney, and the chief executive officer, the sheriff. Prisons are a matter of county concern. Police is always locally regulated, but in the Northern States more usually by the township than by the county. However, this branch of government, so momentous in continental Europe, is in America comparatively unimportant outside the cities. The rural districts get on nearly everywhere with no guardians of the peace, beyond the township constable; nor does the State government, except, of course, through statutes, exercise any control over local police administration. In the rural parts of the Eastern and Middle States property is as safe as any

where in the world. In such parts of the West as are disturbed by dacoits, or by soiitary highwaymen, travellers defend themselves, and, if the sheriff is distant or slack, lynch law may usefully be invoked. The care of the poor is thrown almost everywhere upon local and not upon State authorities, and defrayed out of local funds, sometimes by the county, sometimes by the township. The poor laws of the several States differ in so many particulars that it is impossible to give even an outline of them here. Little out-door relief is given, though in most States the relieving authority may, at his or their discretion, bestow it; and pauperism is not, and has never been, a serious malady, except in some five or six great cities, where it is now vigorously combated by volunteer organizations largely composed of ladies. The total number of persons returned as almshouse-paupers in the whole Union in 1890 was 73,045. Adding 25,000 for persons in receipt of out-door relief, we have a proportion of 1 to 652 of the whole population.

To education I can refer only in passing, because the differences between the arrangements of the several States are too numerous to be described here. It has hitherto been not only a more distinctively local matter, but one relatively far more important than in most parts of Europe. And there is usually a special administrative body, often a special administrative area, created for its purposes -the school committee and the school district. The vast sum expended on public instruction has been already mentioned. Though primarily dealt with by the smallest local circumscription, there is a growing tendency for both the county and the State to interest themselves in the work of instruction by way of inspection, and to some extent of pecuniary subventions. Not only does the county often appoint a county superintendent, but there are in some States county high schools and (in most) county boards of education, besides a State board of commissioners. I need hardly add that the schools of all grades are more numerous and efficient in the Northern and Western than in the Southern States. In old colonial days, when the English commissioners for foreign plantations asked for information on the subject of education from the governors of Virginia and Connecticut, the former replied, "I thank God there are no free schools or printing presses, and I hope