But the fact is that the then existing institutions had come into being as a patchwork development to meet successive new needs. As for local government, there was so little of it and it ministered to such elementary wants that very few serious questions of policy ever rose within its jurisdiction. Moreover, the officers who came in time to have regulative or semi-legislative functions, seem to have been from the beginning, concerned with the details rather than the policies of government. This was true of the justices of the peace in Virginia, the selectmen in the New England town, the supervisors in New York, and the assessors in New Jersey. There was no choice except between selecting and controlling (or trying to control) administrative officers and foregoing any part whatever in local affairs. It is of course not to be understood that no local officers were elected before the Revolution. Massachusetts had always had its town “selectmen” and even as early as 1854 each county elected its treasurer and, beginning at a somewhat later date, the county lieutenants. Supervisors were created as elective officers in New York in 1691, but they were executive and representative officers from the very start. And the same may be said of the town assessors in New Jersey (1693) and the county assessors in Pennsylvania. But the real precedent for “electing everybody” was set in Pennsylvania in 1703 when the sheriffs were first chosen by the people--a step which was followed in 1726 by the establishment of elective county commissioners. But immediately after the Revolution the new notions of democracy began to work more aggressively. Virginia now organized counties and its constitution stipulated that officers not otherwise provided for should be elected by the people. Sheriffs and coroners were made elective under the New Jersey constitution and New York took away the governor’s power of appointment and vested it in a council of appointment, which was composed of the governor and four senators chosen by the legislature. There were cross-currents in this movement, however, and both in the Northwest (under the ordinance of 1787) and in Kentucky and Tennessee, county officers established in the closing years of the eighteenth century were made appointive, in the one case by the governor and in the other by the county judges. But in the new constitutions of Ohio (1802), Indiana (1816), and Illinois (1818), the elective principle worked without a hitch. Mississippi, Alabama, and Missouri followed. By 1821 the passion had seized New York State, and sheriffs and county clerks were thereafter elected by the voters of the counties.