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The Bourbon theory required that kings should speak and that subjects should obey. One direct consequence of a system so uncompromisingly despotic was the loss of all local initiative. Nothing in the faintest degree resembling the New England town-meeting ever existed in New France. Louis XIV objected to public gatherings of his people, even for the most innocent purposes.
I know of an instance where the office of town-clerk was filled by three members of one family during one hundred and fourteen consecutive years. Besides choosing executive officers, the town-meeting has the power of enacting by-laws, of making appropriations of money for town-purposes, and of providing for miscellaneous emergencies by what might be termed special legislation.
The Puritans who colonized New England, therefore, did not invent the town-meeting. They were familiar already with the proceedings of the vestry-meeting and the manorial courts, but they were severed now from church and from aristocracy.
Appreciation of the spoken word was natural to men trained by generations of thoughtful listening to "painful" preaching and by participation in the discussions of town-meeting. Yet appreciation of secular literature was rare, and interest in the other arts was almost non-existent.
The government even of the smallest community must be, at least is, run by parties and by party machinery. But if he wants good government, he must pay as careful attention to the machinery, call it caucus, primary, convention, town-meeting, as he does to the machinery of his own business.
As they had done once before in the annals of his office, the other two selectmen made a party with Sproul's opposers. They signed a call for a special town-meeting. It was held, and an uproarious viva-voce vote settled the fate of the surplus. In the rush of popular excitement the voters did not stop to reflect on the legal aspects of the question.
Five years later the same provision was adopted by Dakota, and under it township government is steadily spreading. In Ohio and Indiana, which derived their local institutions largely from Pennsylvania, there is no such town-meeting, the administrative offices are more or less concentrated in a board of trustees, and the town is quite subordinate to the county.
Not long after a similar meeting was held in Watertown, and the system speedily spread to the other towns. The plan of appointing a body of "townsmen," or selectmen, to sit between meetings of the towns began in February, 1635, in Charlestown. The town-meeting had a great variety of business.
It would be capital fun to have a dog that knows enough to go to town-meeting." Charley took particular pleasure in increasing his excitement on that subject. He told him he had once seen a prairie-dog standing sentinel at the entrance-hole of their habitations.
A council of war is ever fitting prelude to action," replied Standish laying down his bullet-mould and standing up. "And this is a council coram populo," said Winslow smiling. "A congress of the whole people." "Our first town-meeting, if indeed we be a town," said Bradford, answering Winslow's smile. "Alden, we name you sheriff pro tempore, to warn the brethren of this convention.
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