Portland, Maine, is known to thousands throughout the English-speaking world, who are ignorant of every other fact in its long and honorable history, because Francis E. Clark there conceived and began that movement to enlist young people in active Christian service, which is now known as the International Young Peoples Society of Christian Endeavor, with 54,191 local societies, and more than three and one quarter million adherents enrolled, Russia alone, of the nations of the earth, being without a society now. Hartford, Connecticut, with a discernment and gratitude not always displayed by municipalities, has named its beautiful municipal park after Horace Bushnell, for many years its most eminent divine and first citizen.
Salem, fascinating as it is because of its connection with the witchcraft delusion and the early Puritan theocracy; because of its being for a time the home of Hawthorne, who has preserved its ancient local color and atmosphere in his fiction; and because of its ancient glory as a seaport town, whence departed a fleet of sailing craft that made Salem known throughout the world, in places where Boston and New York were then unknown, nevertheless derives its chief glory from the fact that it was the town where Roger Williams, the Welsh statesman and prophet, found a church willing to sit at his feet. The churchs loyalty, however, gave way at last to the resistless pressure of the civil authorities and the zealous ecclesiastical tyrants of the Puritan commonwealth, and it permitted him to depart, to establish in Rhode Island a community based upon the principle of entire liberty of conscience, and majority rule in secular affairs. Massachusetts loss and the worlds gain are thus summed up by Gervinus the German historian:
The theories of freedom in Church and State, taught in the schools of philosophy in Europe, were here [Rhode Island] brought into practice in the government of a small community. It was prophesied that the democratic attempts to obtain universal suffrage, a general elective franchise, annual parliaments, entire religious freedom, and the Miltonian right of schism would be of short duration. But these institutions have not only maintained themselves here, but have spread over the whole Union. They have superseded the aristocratic commencements of Carolina and of New York, the High-Church party in Virginia, the theocracy in Massachusetts, and the monarchy throughout America; they have given laws to one quarter of the globe, and, dreaded for their moral influence, they stand in the background of every democratic struggle in Europe.
Boston, with all her glories, has none of which she is more proud, than the fact that within her borders Phillips Brooks was born and labored most of his life. Those who came within his range of influence said of him, as Father Taylor said of Emerson, He might think this or that, but he was more like Jesus Christ than any one he had ever known.
To mention Roger Williams, Jonathan Edwards, William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Bushnell, Henry Ward Beecher, Phillips Brooks, Francis E. Clark, and Dwight L. Moody, is to name the greatest spiritual forces which New England has known, and towns fed with manna by such prophets have not failed to indicate the influence of personality in transforming environment.
The town-house, or town-hall, of the New England town or village, in its architecture, is a modern structure, often as simple, unpretentious, and unornamented as the meeting-house near which it usually stands on the village green or town common. It is the arena wherein rich and poor, educated and illiterate, wise and foolish, meet, at least annually, and as much oftener as occasion demands, to decide those questions of Home Rule which are most vital to all concerned. Education, wealth, moral worth, shrewd native sense, oratory, gifts of persuasion, the stirrings of ambition, civic pride, thrift, foresight, all have their due weight in this forum, this school as well as source of democracy as Mr. Bryce aptly phrases it. But when the vote is taken, the blacksmith and the bank president, the master and the servant, the principal of the high school and the loafer around the village bar stand on precisely the same footing. The vote of one is as decisive as that of the other, no less, no more.
Debate and procedure which have the qualitative character are followed by voting of the quantitative character, and the result represents average intelligence and capacity for self-government. But that result, because it is the product of the expressed will of all, has an authority more enduring and inspiring than any that the autocracies, oligarchies, or constitutional monarchies of Europe have ever displayed or now possess.
Using the town-meeting as a rapier, Samuel Adams fenced with the British ministry; it was the claymore with which he smote their counsels; it was the harp of a thousand strings that he swept into a burst of passionate defiance, or an electric call to arms, or a proud pæan of exulting triumph, defiance, challenge, and exultation all lifting the continent to independence. His indomitable will and command of the popular confidence played Boston against London, the provincial town-meeting against the royal Parliament, Faneuil Hall against St. Stephens.2
This popular government not only enabled the New England Colonies to lead all the others in the War of the Revolution, it also furnished men and ideas for the formidable task of constitution-making after the Revolution was over and independence won. As early as 1773, the rustic Solons of the town of Mendon, Massachusetts, had resolved in town-meeting:
That all men have an equal right to life, liberty, and property.
Therefore all just and lawful government must originate in the free consent of the people.
That a right to liberty and property, which are natural means of self-preservation, is absolutely inalienable, and can never lawfully be given up by ourselves or taken from us by others.
Naturally, a section of the country where such sentiments were held by village Hampdens had a preponderant influence, when the time came to draft the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and the readiness of the towns to submit to taxation and to give their sons when the call to arms came is a matter of unimpeachable record. In the army of 231,791 soldiers, furnished by the Thirteen Colonies to combat the forces of Great Britain in the Revolution, the four New England Colonies sent 118,251 men, Massachusetts contributing 67,907, Connecticut 31,939, New Hampshire 12,497, and Rhode Island 5,908.
In the War of 1812, New England, as a section, was not very enthusiastic, but her quota of troops was, nevertheless, forthcoming. In the Civil War, 1861-65, her troops were the first to respond to the call of President Lincoln, and, out of 2,778,304 men who enlisted, 363,161 came from New England. Of these, Massachusetts furnished 146,730, Maine 70,107, Connecticut 55,864, New Hampshire 33,937, Vermont 33,288, and Rhode Island 23,236. In fact, surveying the history of New England towns from the time when they contributed their quota of men and money to the aid of the Mother Country in her fight with France to decide who should be supreme on the North American continent, down to the recent contest between the United States and Spain, it can truthfully be said of their democratic form of government that it is the most powerful and flexible in history. It has proved to be neither violent, cruel, nor impatient, but fixed in purpose, faithful to its own officers, tolerant of vast expense, of enormous losses, of torturing delays, and strongest at the very points where fatal weakness was most suspected. And this, be it remembered, where the poorest and most ignorant of every race are the equal voters with the richest and most intelligent. This, too, where the newly landed, propertyless immigrant from Italy or Russia, if able to comply with the generous provisions governing naturalization and the exercise of the franchise, has the same potentiality at the polls as the thrifty, well-to-do, heavily taxed citizen whose ancestors, perchance, may have come over with the Pilgrims on The Mayflower.
Considered either in its origin or its development, the New England town-meeting merits the study of all who are interested in the extension of principles of democracy. The English settlers of New England were, as Mr. Bryce says, largely townsfolk, accustomed to municipal life and to vestry meetings. They brought with them, as an inheritance from their Teutonic ancestors, a habit of self-rule which the peculiar isolation of the colonies and the separate communities in the colonies strengthened; hence a form of government in which the town was the unit evolved inevitably.
The more mixed composition of the population in the Middle Atlantic Colonies, for the same reason, inevitably caused a mixed type of government to be created there, in which the county or shire divided the authority with the town; while in the Southern Colonies the immigrants were of such a character, and the economic conditions so different from those in New England, that a more aristocratic form of government evolved, semi-feudal in its type, and the county, rather than the town, became the important minor political unit within the State, never, however, having a vigorous independent life, the colony and afterward the State becoming the source of authority and the end of government. Long years afterward, in the Civil War, the two types of government clashed, and the type prevailed which Thomas Jefferson praised and wished transferred to Virginia, for, said he:
Those wards called townships in New England are the vital principle of their governments, and have proved themselves the wisest invention ever devised by the wit of man for the perfect exercise of self-government and for its preservation.
It is well, however, to note, that Mr. Charles Borgeaud, the eminent Genevan historian, in his work on the Rise of Modern Democracy, disputes the Teutonic origin of the town-meeting, and contends that it must be credited to the democratic principles of the New Testament as interpreted and accepted, first by the Brownists of England, and held later by the Pilgrim Fathers and those of the Puritans who accepted the Independent form of church government, rather than to any principle of communal government first evolved by Teutons. He says:
At the moment when the colonists of New England quitted the Mother Country, whatever was left of that old self-government which had been exercised by their forefathers was under the influence of the general movement, and was undergoing aristocratic transformation. The vestries, or meetings of the inhabitants of the parish, were being replaced by committees known as select vestries, which were originally elected, and then, before long, recruited by co-optation. Had the American colonists purely and simply imitated in their new country the system which they had seen at work in England, they certainly would not have founded the democratic government of the town-meeting. In order to explain their political activity, we must take into account, and that largely, their religious ideas. And we shall be naturally led to do this if we remember that, in the beginning, each settlement or town was, before all things, a congregation, and that the town-meeting was in most cases the same thing as the assembly of the congregation. In Virginia, where the colonists remained members of the Anglican Church, there was no town-meeting, but only select vestries as in England, and these had certainly lost all family likeness, if they really were related to the Thing and the Tungemot.
In due time, when pioneers from New England found their way to the then virgin lands of Central New York, the valley of the Ohio, and the northern half of the vast valley of the Mississippi, they carried with them the political and religious ideals of New England. Where they were a large majority of the settlers within a given territory, or where at the time when its organic structure was forming they dominated it, the town was established as the political unit in the territory. Such was the case in Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Where New England settlers joined with those from the Middle States, or the border States of Kentucky and Virginia, they often found it necessary to compromise on a system in which the county and the town were peers, as in Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa. But, as experience has proved, the modified township system, as it is found in Illinois and Michigan, is more advantageous than the system of divided authority, and many of the Western States are gradually adopting it, California, Nebraska, and the Dakotas having recently made it either permissible or mandatory.
Nor are signs lacking that in the South, as its white population increases by immigrants from the North, as the patriarchal and pastoral type of civilization gives way to the modern industrial and corporate type, as cities and towns multiply, and local as well as State pride has free chance to develop, there will be an adoption of the modified township system and a gradual abolition of the county system.
Among the changes of the last half-century in New England, one notable one has been the tendency of the larger towns to adopt the city form of government as soon as it was deemed that the increase of population warranted the step and made it necessary. This fact, as well as the marked increase of urban population in New England,3 is counted by some students of her social development as indicative of retrogression, however inevitable. Certain it is, that if the town of Brookline, with its population of 16,164, and its property valuation of $64,169,200,4 and annual appropriations of more than $900,000, can still work the ancient machinery of the town-meeting without the slightest loss either of a pecuniary or a civic sort, other towns, with a smaller population and much smaller valuation of property, cannot reasonably claim that mere physical growth is any warrant for the change from a system so purely democratic to one less so and much more readily adapted to serve the ends of partisan bosses and those who batten at the public crib.
The third of the indispensable and ever-present institutions found in every New England town or village is the public school, open to all and supported by all. Roman Catholic, Protestant and Jew, Caucasian and African, French Canadian and Irish, Italian and Portuguese, English and German, mingle in the school-room and learn the essential likeness of each to the other, their common and peculiar gifts, and their common duties to God and the State. No man in the community is so rich or aristocratic as to escape taxation for support of the school, even though his children may never darken the doors. No man in the community is so humble or so poor as to be debarred from sending his children to the highest as well as to the lowest grades. Unsectarian in the sense that they derive support from taxpayers of all sects and inculcate the dogmas of none, secular in the sense that religion is not a part of the curriculum, they ever have been a bulwark to the cause of religion, partly by reason of the example of the teaching force, who usually are men and women with religious faith as well as mental attainment, and partly because they have developed the rational powers of men, and thus enabled them to discriminate between superstition and truth. Beginning, in the more favored and advanced communities, with kindergarten instruction for young children, and not ceasing until the youth or maiden is prepared to enter the college or university, the State and the town, co-operating together, make it possible for every parent to give to his children, or for every ambitious or friendless boy or girl to secure for himself or herself, at the public expense, a thorough preparatory education. Nor is there any item of his yearly tax bill which the typical New Englander pays with greater alacrity and more certainty of belief as to its equity or economy than his annual contribution for popular education. For it is ingrained in his very being, woven into the texture of his life, to believe, as Garfield said, that next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained. Moreover, being shrewd as well as a man of high principles and a lover of learning for its own sake, the New Englander is convinced that it pays to be educated, and to have educated neighbors and children. His reasoning takes this form: The more children in the schools, the fewer youths and adults in the jails and poorhouses. The better informed the mill operatives, the larger the output of the mills. The higher the standard of living, the larger the demand for the product of the soil and the loom, and the better the home market. The more intelligent the voter, the less the seductive power of the demagogue and the political boss. In short, the New England people have always believed, and still believe, what the inscription on the Public Library in Boston declares: