Читать книгу Civil Government in the United States Considered with Some Reference to Its Origins - Fiske John - Страница 47

[Sidenote: Town-meetings in Greece and Rome.] It was said above that government by town-meeting is in principle the oldest form of government known in the world. The student of ancient history is familiar with the comitia of the Romans and the ecclesia of the Greeks. These were popular assemblies, held in those soft climates in the open air, usually in the market-place—the Roman forum, the Greek agora. The government carried on in them was a more or less qualified democracy. In the palmy days of Athens it was a pure democracy. The assemblies which in the Athenian market-place declared war against Syracuse, or condemned Socrates to death, were quite like New England town-meetings, except that they exercised greater powers because there was no state government above them.

[Sidenote: Clans.] The principle of the town-meeting, however, is older than Athens or Rome. Long before streets were built or fields fenced in, men wandered about the earth hunting for food in family parties, somewhat as lions do in South Africa. Such family groups were what we call clans, and so far as is known they were the earliest form in which civil society appeared on the earth. Among all wandering or partially settled tribes the clan is to be found, and there are ample opportunities for studying it among our Indians in North America. The clan usually has a chief or head-man, useful mainly as a leader in wartime; its civil government, crude and disorderly enough, is in principle a pure democracy.

[Sidenote: The mark and the tun.] When our ancestors first became acquainted with American Indians, the most advanced tribes lived partly by hunting and fishing, but partly also by raising Indian corn and pumpkins. They had begun to live in wigwams grouped together in small villages and surrounded by strong rows of palisades for defence. Now what these red men were doing our own fair-haired ancestors in northern and central Europe had been doing some twenty centuries earlier. The Scandinavians and Germans, when first known in history, had made considerable progress in exchanging a wandering for a settled mode of life. When the clan, instead of moving from place to place, fixed upon some spot for a permanent residence, a village grew up there, surrounded by a belt of waste land, or somewhat later by a stockaded wall. The belt of land was called a mark, and the wall was called a tun.[5] Afterwards the enclosed space came to be known sometimes as the mark, sometimes as the tun or town. In England the latter name prevailed. The inhabitants of a mark or town were a stationary clan. It was customary to call them by the clan name, as for example "the Beorings" or "the Crossings;" then the town would be called Barrington, "town of the Beorings," or Cressingham, "home of the Cressings." Town names of this sort, with which the map of England is thickly studded, point us back to a time when the town was supposed to be the stationary home of a clan.

[Footnote 1: Pronounced "toon."]

[Sidenote: The Old English township.] [Sidenote: The manor.] The Old English town had its tungemot, or town-meeting, in which "by-laws" were made and other important business transacted. The principal officers were the "reeve" or head-man, the "beadle" or messenger, and the "tithing-man" or petty constable. These officers seem at first to have been elected by the people, but after a while, as great lordships grew up, usurping jurisdiction over the land, the lord's steward and bailiff came to supersede the reeve and beadle. After the Norman Conquest the townships, thus brought under the sway of great lords, came to be generally known by the French name of manors or "dwelling places." Much might be said about this change, but here it is enough for us to bear in mind that a manor was essentially a township in which the chief executive officers were directly responsible to the lord rather than to the people. It would be wrong, however, to suppose that the manors entirely lost their self-government. Even the ancient town-meeting survived in them, in a fragmentary way, in several interesting assemblies, of which the most interesting were the court leet, for the election of certain officers and the trial of petty offences, and the court baron, which was much like a town-meeting.

[Sidenote: The parish.] Still more of the old self-government would doubtless have survived in the institutions of the manor if it had not been provided for in another way. The parish was older than the manor. After the English had been converted to Christianity local churches were gradually set up all over the country, and districts called parishes were assigned for the ministrations of the priests. Now a parish generally coincided in area with a township, or sometimes with a group of two or three townships. In the old heathen times each town seems to have had its sacred place or shrine consecrated to some local deity, and it was a favourite policy with the Roman missionary priests to purify the old shrine and turn it into a church. In this way the township at the same time naturally became the parish.

[Sidenote: Township, manor, and parish.] [Sidenote: The vestry-meeting.] As we find it in later times, both before and since the founding of English colonies in North America, the township in England is likely to be both a manor and a parish. For some purposes it is the one, for some purposes it is the other. The townsfolk may be regarded as a group of tenants of the lord's manor, or as a group of parishioners of the local church. In the latter aspect the parish retained much of the self-government of the ancient town. The business with which the lord was entitled to meddle was strictly limited, and all other business was transacted in the "vestry-meeting," which was practically the old town-meeting under a new name. In the course of the thirteenth century we find that the parish had acquired the right of taxing itself for church purposes. Money needed for the church was supplied in the form of "church-rates" voted by the ratepayers themselves in the vestry-meeting, so called because it was originally held in a room of the church in which vestments were kept.

[Sidenote: Parish officers.] The officers of the parish were the constable, the parish and vestry clerks,[6] the beadle,[7] the "waywardens" or surveyors of highways, the "haywards" or fence-viewers, the "common drivers," the collectors of taxes, and at the beginning of the seventeenth century overseers of the poor were added. There were also churchwardens, usually two for each, parish. Their duties were primarily to take care of the church property, assess the rates, and call the vestry-meetings. They also acted as overseers of the poor, and thus in several ways remind one of the selectmen of New England. The parish officers were all elected by the ratepayers assembled in vestry-meeting, except the common driver and hayward, who were elected by the same ratepayers assembled in court leet. Besides electing parish officers and granting the rates, the vestry-meeting could enact by-laws; and all ratepayers had an equal voice in its deliberations.

[Footnote 6: Of these two officers the vestry clerk is the counterpart of the New England town-clerk.]

[Footnote 7: Originally a messenger or crier, the beadle came to assume some of the functions of the tithing-man or petty constable, such as keeping order in church, punishing petty offenders, waiting on the clergyman, etc. In New England towns there were formerly officers called tithing-men, who kept order in church, arrested tipplers, loafers, and Sabbath-breakers, etc.]

[Sidenote: The transition from England to New England.] During the last two centuries the constitution of the English parish has undergone some modifications which need not here concern us. The Puritans who settled in New England had grown up under such parish government as is here described, and they were used to hearing the parish called, on some occasions and for some purposes, a township. If we remember now that the earliest New England towns were founded by church congregations, led by their pastors, we can see how town government in New England originated. It was simply the English parish government brought into a new country and adapted to the new situation. Part of this new situation consisted in the fact that the lords of the manor were left behind. There was no longer any occasion to distinguish between the township as a manor and the township as a parish; and so, as the three names had all lived on together, side by side, in England, it was now the oldest and most generally descriptive name, "township," that survived, and has come into use throughout a great part of the United States. The townsfolk went on making by-laws, voting supplies of public money, and electing their magistrates in America, after the fashion with which they had for ages been familiar in England. Some of their offices and customs were of hoary antiquity. If age gives respectability, the office of constable may vie with that of king; and if the annual town-meeting is usually held in the month of March, it is because in days of old, long before Magna Charta was thought of, the rules and regulations for the village husbandry were discussed and adopted in time for the spring planting.

[Sidenote: Building up states.] To complete our sketch of the origin of the New England town, one point should here be briefly mentioned in anticipation of what will have to be said hereafter; but it is a point of so much importance that we need not mind a little repetition in stating it.

[Sidenote: Representation.] We have seen what a great part taxation plays in the business of government, and we shall presently have to treat of county, state, and federal governments, all of them wider in their sphere than the town government. In the course of history, as nations have gradually been built up, these wider governments have been apt to absorb or supplant and crush the narrower governments, such as the parish or township; and this process has too often been destructive to political freedom. Such a result is, of course, disastrous to everybody; and if it were unavoidable, it would be better that great national governments need never be formed. But it is not unavoidable. There is one way of escaping it, and that is to give the little government of the town some real share in making up the great government of the state. That is not an easy thing to do, as is shown by the fact that most peoples have failed in the attempt. The people who speak the English language have been the most successful, and the device by which they have overcome the difficulty is REPRESENTATION. The town sends to the wider government a delegation of persons who can represent the town and its people. They can speak for the town, and have a voice in the framing of laws and imposition of taxes by the wider government.

[Sidenote: Shire-motes.] [Sidenote: Earl Simon's Parliament.] In English townships there has been from time immemorial a system of representation. Long before Alfred's time there were "shire-motes," or what were afterwards called county meetings, and to these each town sent its reeve and "four discreet men" as representatives. Thus to a certain extent the wishes of the townsfolk could be brought to bear upon county affairs. By and by this method was applied on a much wider scale. It was applied to the whole kingdom, so that the people of all its towns and parishes succeeded in securing a representation of their interests in an elective national council or House of Commons. This great work was accomplished in the thirteenth century by Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, and was completed by Edward I. Simon's parliament, the first in which the Commons were fully represented, was assembled in 1265; and the date of Edward's parliament, which has been called the Model Parliament, was 1295. These dates have as much interest for Americans as for Englishmen, because they mark the first definite establishment of that grand system of representative government which we are still carrying on at our various state capitals and at Washington. For its humble beginnings we have to look back to the "reeve and four" sent by the ancient townships to the county meetings.

[Sidenote: Township as unit of representation.] The English township or parish was thus at an early period the "unit of representation" in the government of the county. It was also a district for the assessment and collection of the national taxes; in each parish the assessment was made by a board of assessors chosen by popular vote. These essential points reappear in the early history of New England. The township was not only a self-governing body, but it was the "unit of representation" in the colonial legislature, or "General Court;" and the assessment of taxes, whether for town purposes or for state purposes, was made by assessors elected by the townsfolk. In its beginnings and fundamentals our political liberty did not originate upon American soil, but was brought hither by our forefathers the first settlers. They brought their political institutions with them as naturally as they brought their language and their social customs.

[Sidenote: The Russian village community; not represented in the national government.] Observe now that the township is to be regarded in two lights. It must be considered not only in itself, but as part of a greater whole. We began by describing it as a self-governing body, but in order to complete our sketch we were obliged to speak of it as a body which has a share in the government of the state and the nation. The latter aspect is as important as the former. If the people of a town had only the power of managing their local affairs, without the power of taking part in the management of national affairs, their political freedom would be far from complete. In Russia, for example, the larger part of the vast population is resident in village communities which have to a considerable extent the power of managing their local affairs. Such a village community is called a mir, and like the English township it is lineally descended from the stationary clan. The people of the Russian mir hold meetings in which they elect sundry local officers, distribute the burden of local taxation, make regulations concerning local husbandry and police, and transact other business which need not here concern us. But they have no share in the national government, and are obliged to obey laws which they have no voice in making, and pay taxes assessed upon them without their consent; and accordingly we say with truth that the Russian people do not possess political freedom. One reason for this has doubtless been that in times past the Russian territory was the great frontier battle-ground between civilized Europe and the wild hordes of western Asia, and the people who lived for ages on that turbulent frontier were subjected to altogether too much conquest. They have tasted too little of civil government and too much of military government—a pennyworth of wholesome bread to an intolerable deal of sack. The early English, in their snug little corner of the world, belted by salt sea, were able to develop their civil government with less destructive interference. They made a sound and healthful beginning when they made the township the "unit of representation" for the county. Then the township, besides managing its own affairs, began to take part in the management of wider affairs.