They had been trained in self-government, and were sticklers for healthy political precedents. They were the heirs of grim and sturdy Teutonic ancestors who knew no rule but that imposed by "the armed assembly of the whole people." The germs of modern English free and representative institutions are to be plainly traced in the forest councils of the Germanic tribes. In the succeeding ages these institutions had grown irregularly, but it was a growth founded on the irresistible will of the people; they had descended to the men of the seventeenth century as the sacred heirlooms of generations which had freely spent blood and treasure for the rights of all Englishmen to come. The principle and habit of self-government were deep rooted in the heart of every English commoner; it was a part of his nature. And this principle, this habit, he brought with him to America. English institutions were merely transplanted to the New World, where they developed with perhaps greater rapidity than at home,--certainly on somewhat different and characteristic lines; but they were and still are English institutions. 24. Local Government in the Colonies. Sidenote: The English town and county. The primary local body in the England which these first colonists to America knew, was the parish, or town, which had both an ecclesiastical and a temporal jurisdiction. Next above the parishes was the territorial division known as the county, with an independent magistracy and a judicial and military organization adapted to the needs of a large rural area. In making independent settlements on the American coast, the English commercial companies and proprietors were not establishing states; what they planted were but the germs of states. Each detached colony had a distinct life, and it was natural that, despite the general rules of government established by the companies, the people should proceed at once to govern themselves in their local affairs upon either the town or the county plan, according to circumstances. The flexibility of English representative institutions has never elsewhere been so well illustrated as in the different forms they took on in the American colonies, without once departing from the integrity of historic models. Sidenote: The county the political unit in the Southern colonies;