“At the moment when the colonists of New England quitted the Mother Country, whatever was left of that old self-government which had been exercised by their forefathers was under the influence of the general movement, and was undergoing aristocratic transformation. The vestries, or meetings of the inhabitants of the parish, were being replaced by committees known as select vestries, which were originally elected, and then, before long, recruited by co-optation. Had the American colonists purely and simply imitated in their new country the system which they had seen at work in England, they certainly would not have founded the democratic government of the town-meeting. In order to explain their political activity, we must take into account, and that largely, their religious ideas. And we shall be naturally led to do this if we remember that, in the beginning, each settlement or town was, before all things, a congregation, and that the town-meeting was in most cases the same thing as the assembly of the congregation. In Virginia, where the colonists remained members of the Anglican Church, there was no town-meeting, but only select vestries as in England, and these had certainly lost all family likeness, if they really were related to the _Thing_ and the _Tungemot_.” In due time, when pioneers from New England found their way to the then virgin lands of Central New York, the valley of the Ohio, and the northern half of the vast valley of the Mississippi, they carried with them the political and religious ideals of New England. Where they were a large majority of the settlers within a given territory, or where at the time when its organic structure was forming they dominated it, the town was established as the political unit in the territory. Such was the case in Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Where New England settlers joined with those from the Middle States, or the border States of Kentucky and Virginia, they often found it necessary to compromise on a system in which the county and the town were peers, as in Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa. But, as experience has proved, the modified township system, as it is found in Illinois and Michigan, is more advantageous than the system of divided authority, and many of the Western States are gradually adopting it, California, Nebraska, and the Dakotas having recently made it either permissible or mandatory. Nor are signs lacking that in the South, as its white population increases by immigrants from the North, as the patriarchal and pastoral type of civilization gives way to the modern industrial and corporate type, as cities and towns multiply, and local as well as State pride has free chance to develop, there will be an adoption of the modified township system and a gradual abolition of the county system.