We may go further back than this. History tells us that "the boroughs (towns) of England, during the period of oppression, after the Norman invasion, led the way in the silent growth and elevation of the English people; that, unnoticed and despised by prelate and noble, they had alone preserved the full tradition of Teutonic liberty; that, by their traders and shopkeepers, the rights of self-government, of free speech in free meeting, of equal justice by one's equals, were brought safely across the ages of Norman tyranny."[A] The rights of self-government and free speech in free meeting, then, were rights and practices of our Anglo-Saxon ancestry, and we are to go back with them across the English channel to their barbarian German home, and to the people described by Tacitus in his Germania, for the origin, as far as we can trace it, of this part of our inheritance. These people were famed for their spirit of independence and freedom. The mass are described as freemen, voting together in the great assemblies of the tribe, and choosing their own leaders or kings from the class of nobles, who were nobles not as constituting a distinct and privileged caste. "It was their greater estates and the greater consequence which accompanied these that marked their rank." When we first learn of these assemblies, they are out-of-doors, under the broad canopy of heaven alone, but the time came, as the rathhaus of the German town to-day attests, when they built the common hall or town-house; and we, to-day, in this remote and then unknown and unconjectured land of the West, are in this regard their heirs as well as descendants.[B] [Footnote A: Green's Short History of the English People, chap. ii, sec. 6.] [Footnote B: The present rathhaus of the quaint old city of Nuremberg, built in 1619, is a notable building, much visited by travelers. Around the wall of the hall within runs the legend: "Eins manns red ist eine halbe red, man soll die teyl verhören bed,"--"One man's talk is a half talk; one should hear both sides."]