In New England, the narrowness of the Atlantic slope, the shortness of the rivers, the severe climate, the hostility of the savages, the neighborhood of the French, the density of the forests, and the fact that each community was an organized religious congregation,--people belonging to one church, who had "resolved to live together,"--led to the establishment of more or less compact communities, called towns; and these were the political and ecclesiastical units. Since the conditions were changed, some features of the English parish were modified to suit the more primitive necessities of life in the wilderness. Thus we find that here and there in New England was a reversion to older Teutonic forms, although of this significant fact the colonists themselves were unaware; for the now familiar truth that the ancestry of our institutions reaches back to the beginnings of the race, had not then been discovered. Not only was the English town government practically reproduced on American soil, with such changes as were adapted to the new environment, but the titles of the town officials were, in many cases, borrowed from the mother-land. When the first town meeting was held, English local government had been successfully grafted upon the New World. Sidenote: The mixed system in the middle colonies. In the middle colonies, which partook of the climatic characteristics of both their Northern and Southern neighbors, and had a population made up of various nationalities, there were compact trading towns as well as large agricultural regions; and there we find a mixed system, of both townships and counties. Sidenote: Differences only in form. With all these differences in form, the principle at work was the same. From the beginning the American colonists were hampered in the work of their general assemblies, at first by commercial companies, and then by royal and proprietary interference; nevertheless, in the conduct of their purely local affairs they often exercised a greater degree of freedom than their brethren in England. It is the purpose of this and succeeding volumes to show how, amid many shiftings, unions, and divisions, these isolated, self-governing English colonies, planted independently here and there in the American wilds, unconscious of the great future before them, were, by an orderly, logical progression of events, the trend of which was often not noticeable to the men of the time, successfully merged, at first into states, and finally into a nation. 25. Colonial Governments. Sidenote: Social distinctions.