[2] Hart, "Actual Government," p. 172. =Town Government in the West.=--Town government is not confined to New England; it has been carried to many Western states where immigrants from New England have settled, though in none of them does it possess the vitality or play the important part in the management of public affairs that it does in the older communities where it originated. In the states of the South and the far West, there is no general system of town government. Counties, however, are usually divided into districts for a few unimportant purposes. COUNTY GOVERNMENT =The County.=--The county[3] is a civil division created by the state partly for purposes of state administration and partly for local government. New York city embraces within its boundaries five counties; other cities, like Chicago, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Cincinnati, contain within their limits the larger part of the population of the counties in which they are situated. The population of a large majority of the counties, however, is predominantly rural rather than urban in character, and where there is a large city within a county, most of the affairs of that portion of the county lying within the city limits are managed by the city government. [3] The corresponding division in Louisiana is called a parish. _Population and Area._--The population of the counties, and their areas, vary widely. Several counties in Texas in 1910 had less than 400 inhabitants each, New York county, on the other hand, had more than 2,750,000. The most populous counties are in the Eastern states, and the least populous in the South and West. There are now about 3,000 counties in all the states, the number in each state ranging from three in Delaware and five in Rhode Island to 244 in Texas. In proportion to population Massachusetts has a smaller number (fourteen) than any other state in the Union. In many states the minimum size of counties is fixed by the constitution. The minimum limit where it is fixed by the constitution is usually 400 square miles, though in some states it is 600 or 700 and in Texas it is 900 square miles. Where no such restrictions have been prescribed, however, as in some of the old states, the area is sometimes very small. In Rhode Island, for example, there is one county with an area of only 25 square miles. New York has one county (New York) with an area of 21 square miles, and another (St. Lawrence) with an area of 2,880 square miles. On the other hand, Choteau county in Montana has an area of over 16,000 square miles, being considerably larger than the combined area of several of the smaller states.