pointed out on pages 172-177. The study of our state governments is inextricably wrapped up with the study of our national government, in such wise that both are parts of one subject, which cannot be understood unless both parts are studied. Whether in the course of our country's future development we shall ever arrive at a stage in which this is not the case, must be left for future events to determine. But, if we ever do arrive at such a stage, "American institutions" will present a very different aspect from those with which we are now familiar, and which we have always been accustomed (even, perhaps, without always understanding them) to admire. [Footnote 1: Young's _Government Class Book_, p. iv.] The study of local government properly includes town, county, and city. To this part of the subject I have devoted about half of my limited space, quite unheedful of the warning which I find in the preface of a certain popular text-book, that "to learn the duties of town, city, and county officers, has nothing whatever to do with the grand and noble subject of Civil Government," and that "to attempt class drill on petty town and county offices, would be simply burlesque of the whole subject." But, suppose one were to say, with an air of ineffable scorn, that petty experiments on terrestrial gravitation and radiant heat, such as can be made with commonplace pendulums and tea-kettles, have nothing whatever to do with the grand and noble subject of Physical Astronomy! Science would not have got very far on that plan, I fancy. The truth is, that science, while it is perpetually dealing with questions of magnitude, and knows very well what is large and what is small, knows nothing whatever of any such distinction as that between things that are "grand" and things that are "petty." When we try to study things in a scientific spirit, to learn their modes of genesis and their present aspects, in order that we may foresee their tendencies, and make our volitions count for something in modifying them, there is nothing which we may safely disregard as trivial. This is true of whatever we can study; it is eminently true of the history of institutions. Government is not a royal mystery, to be shut off, like old Deiokes,[2] by a sevenfold wall from the ordinary business of life. Questions of civil government are practical business questions, the principles of which are as often and as forcibly illustrated in a city council or a county board of supervisors, as in the House of Representatives at Washington. It is partly because too many of our citizens fail to realize that local government is a worthy study, that we find it making so much trouble for us. The "bummers" and "boodlers" do not find the subject beneath their notice; the Master who inspires them is wide awake and--for a creature that divides the hoof--extremely intelligent. [Footnote 2: Herodotus, i. 98.]