American Political Ideas Viewed from the Standpoint of Universal History | Page 9

magistrate
is augmented and that of the election diminished, while the public spirit
of the local communities is less quickly awakened and less influential."
This is almost equally true to-day; yet with all these differences in local
organization, there is no part of our country in which the spirit of local
self-government can be called weak or uncertain. I have described the
Town-meeting as it exists in the states where it first grew up and has
since chiefly flourished. But something very like the "town-meeting
principle" lies at the bottom of all the political life of the United States.
To maintain vitality in the centre without sacrificing it in the parts; to
preserve tranquillity in the mutual relations of forty powerful states,
while keeping the people everywhere as far as possible in direct contact
with the government; such is the political problem which the American
Union exists for the purpose of solving; and of this great truth every
American citizen is supposed to have some glimmering, however
crude.
It has been said that the town-governments of New England were
established without any conscious reference to precedent; but, however
this may be, they are certainly not without precedents and analogies, to
enumerate which will carry us very far back in the history of the Aryan
world. At the beginning of his essay on the "Growth of the English
Constitution," Mr. Freeman gives an eloquent account of the May
assemblies of Uri and Appenzell, when the whole people elect their
magistrates for the year and vote upon amendments to the old laws or
upon the adoption of new ones. Such a sight Mr. Freeman seems to
think can be seen nowhere but in Switzerland, and he reckons it among
the highest privileges of his life to have looked upon it. But I am unable
to see in what respect the town-meeting in Massachusetts differs from
the Landesgemeinde or cantonal assembly in Switzerland, save that it is
held in a town-hall and not in the open air, that it is conducted with
somewhat less of pageantry, and that the freemen who attend do not
carry arms even by way of ceremony. In the Swiss assembly, as Mr.
Freeman truly observes, we see exemplified the most democratic phase
of the old Teutonic constitution as described in the "Germania" of
Tacitus, "the earliest picture which history can give us of the political

and social being of our own forefathers." The same remark, in precisely
the same terms, would be true of the town-meetings of New England.
Political institutions, on the White Mountains and on the Alps, not only
closely resemble each other, but are connected by strict bonds of
descent from a common original.
The most primitive self-governing body of which we have any
knowledge is the village-community of the ancient Teutons, of which
such strict counterparts are found in other parts of the Aryan world as
to make it apparent that in its essential features it must be an
inheritance from prehistoric Aryan antiquity. In its Teutonic form the
primitive village-community (or rather, the spot inhabited by it) is
known as the Mark,--that is, a place defined by a boundary-line. One
characteristic of the mark-community is that all its free members are in
theory supposed to be related to each other through descent from a
common progenitor; and in this respect the mark-community agrees
with the gens, [Greek: _ginos_], or clan. The earliest form of political
union in the world is one which rests, not upon territorial contiguity,
but upon I blood-relationship, either real or assumed through the legal
fiction of adoption. In the lowest savagery blood-relationship is the
only admissible or conceivable ground for sustained common action
among groups of men. Among peoples which wander about, supporting
themselves either by hunting, or at a somewhat more advanced stage of
development by the rearing of flocks and herds, a group of men, thus
permanently associated through ties of blood-relationship, is what we
call a clan. When by the development of agricultural pursuits the
nomadic mode of life is brought to an end, when the clan remains
stationary upon some piece of territory surrounded by a strip of
forest-land, or other boundaries natural or artificial, then the clan
becomes a mark-community. The profound linguistic researches of
Pictet, Fick, and others have made it probable that at the time when the
Old-Aryan language was broken up into the dialects from which the
existing languages of Europe are descended, the Aryan tribes were
passing from a purely pastoral stage of barbarism into an incipient
agricultural stage, somewhat like that which characterized the Iroquois
tribes in America in the seventeenth century. The comparative study of
institutions leads to results in harmony with this view, showing us the

mark-community of our Teutonic ancestors with the clear traces of its
origin in