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Updated: June 4, 2025
The selectmen are elected every year in the month of April or of May. The town-meeting chooses at the same time a number of municipal magistrates, who are intrusted with important administrative functions. The assessors rate the township; the collectors receive the rate.
Bible and meeting-house, school-house and town-meeting, thus illustrate concretely the responsiveness of the American character to idealistic impulses. They are external symbols of a certain state of mind. It may indeed be urged that they are primarily signs of a moral and social or institutional trend, and are therefore non-literary evidence of American idealism.
When the town-meeting is abolished freedom will have lost her humble but most powerful ally. When the town grows to a city all is lost; for our freedom and individual rights depend on direct and individual participation in public affairs. Otherwise, all is compromise, averages, irresponsibility and mere chance how affairs turn out. The larger the city, the easier it is for rascals to rule.
They yelled for three minutes without ever a stop, until some fellow, versed in town-meeting methods, began yelling for "Speech!" and that started others, and "Speech!" was the word ringing all over the hall, and that was more than enough to start Geordie. Speak he could not and would not.
In early times there was a fine for non-attendance, but at is no longer the case; it is supposed that a due regard to his own interests will induce every man to come. The town-meeting is held in the town-house, but at first it used to be held in the church, which was thus a "meeting-house" for civil as well as ecclesiastical purposes.
Here, with torn corners fluttering in the wind, hang weather-stained probate notices, mildewed town-meeting warnings, and tattered placards of sheriff's sales; for no estate can be settled, no land set off or chattel sold on execution, no legal meeting of the voters or freemen holden, without previous notice on the sign-post.
Hence the discipline of our soldiers has been generally that of a town-meeting or of an engine-company, rather than that of an army; and it shows the extraordinary quality of the individual men, that so much has been accomplished with such a formidable defect in the organization. Even granting that there has been a great and constant improvement, the evil is still vast enough.
The minister is a functionary and the meeting-house a functionary; they are one and, when they have spent all their week in private and selfish action, the Sunday reminds them of a need they have to stand again in social and public and ideal relations beyond neighborhood, higher than the town-meeting to their fellow men.
And there was Hutchinson, promising everything in his dismay, hurrying between the soldiers and the crowd, his feet making blood-stained marks in the snow as he went. To no man more than to him was due the guilt of that night's work. Prompt and clean measures were taken: a town-meeting was held, and the immediate withdrawal of all troops from Boston was required.
The family was considered the social unit. Several families near together made a township, the affairs of the township being settled by the male freeholders, who met together to determine by conference what should be done. This was the germ of the "town-meeting" and of popular government. Cerdic, first Saxon king, was simply Cerdic the "Ealdorman" or "Alder-mann."
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