=Importance of Local Government.=--With the growth and congestion of population in centers, and the increasing complexity of our industrial and social life, the importance of local self-government has enormously increased. The local governments touch us at many more points to-day than does either the state or the national government; they regulate a far larger proportion of the concerns of our everyday life; and hence we feel the effects of corrupt or inefficient local government more keenly than we feel the effects of inefficient state or national government. We depend largely upon our local governments for the maintenance of the peace, order, and security of the community; for the protection of the public health; for the support of our schools; for the construction and maintenance of roads and bridges; for the care of the poor; and if we live in a city, for protection against fire, for our water supply, usually, and for many other services essential to our comfort and happiness. Finally, the larger proportion of the taxes we pay goes toward the support of local government--a fact which makes it very important that our local governments should be efficiently, honestly, and economically conducted. =Types of Local Government.=--The form of local government existing in each state is such as the state itself provides, the national government having no authority whatever over the matter. Such differences as exist are more largely the result of historical conditions growing out of the early settlement of the states, than of any pronounced differences of opinion among the people in regard to forms of government. Since colonial times there have been three general types of local rural government in America: the _town system_, in New England; the _county system_, which originated in Virginia and spread to other colonies and states; and the _county-township type_--a combination of the first two forms--which developed in the middle colonies of New York and Pennsylvania and was carried to many Western states by settlers from the middle states, and is now the most common form to be found. TOWN GOVERNMENT