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You have uniformly experienced that your representatives are as careful, if not more so, of your money, than you yourselves are in your town-meetings; but still your representatives are generally men of property, and those of them who are most independent, and those whom you have sent to Congress, have not been by any means the least careful. A Countryman, V.
The Dutch villages had their assemblies, which under the English rule were developed into town-meetings, though with less ample powers than those of New England. The governing body of the New York town consisted of the constable and eight overseers, who answered in most respects to the selectmen of New England.
Of all the agencies in organizing resistance to Great Britain none were more powerful than the New England town-meetings, among which that of the people of Boston stood preëminent, and in the Boston town-meeting for more than thirty years no other man exerted so much influence as Samuel Adams.
There were no town-meetings, as the smallest political division was the division into counties; but there were county-meetings quite vigorous with political life. Of the leading county families a great many were descended from able and distinguished Cavaliers or King's-men who had come over from England during the ascendency of Oliver Cromwell.
Its senates were assemblies of notables, constituting in the main an aristocracy of men who had held high office; its popular assemblies were primary assemblies, town-meetings. There was no notion of such a thing as political power delegated by the people to representatives who were to wield it away from home and out of sight of their constituents.
This currency bore the crown and fleur-de-lis and signatures of officials, and gradually became depreciated and worthless. While the townsfolk of Massachusetts were discussing affairs in town-meetings, the French inhabitants of Canada were never allowed to take part in public assemblies but were taught to depend in the most trivial matters on a paternal government.
Here, as elsewhere, there was always a great fight at town-meetings for these school board positions, especially when the school-book agents became numerous, for these committees could secure from said agents unlimited free books, and get high prices for all their spavined horses, dried up cows, and sick pigs in return for voting for rival text-books.
When the subject was not generally exciting, town-meetings were usually composed of the selectmen, the town officers, and thirty or forty inhabitants. Those who thus came were for the most part drawn to it from some official duty or private interest, which, when performed or attained, they generally troubled themselves but little, or not at all, about the other business of the meeting.
He went to the polls and voted; he attended town-meetings and political caucuses, but never took an active share in them. The prohibition of liquor, the tariff question, the woman suffrage movement, and other like vexatious matters he left severely alone. I doubt if any one discovered from first to last what his real opinions were on these subjects.
Its educational value is far higher than that of the newspaper, which, in spite of its many merits as a diffuser of information, is very apt to do its best to bemuddle and sophisticate plain facts. The period when town-meetings ware most important from the wide scope of their transactions was the period of earnest and sometimes stormy discussion that ushered in our Revolutionary war.
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