Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III VARIATIONS FROM THE NEW ENGLAND TYPE Town Organization Outside New England.—One might be inclined to suspect that little towns, similar to those that have been described, sprang up all along the American coast wherever English settlers established themselves. The town type of organization seems so simple, so logical, so democratic, and so altogether admirable that one may well wonder why it was not established everywhere. If it had happened thus, then indeed the roots of our local government would have been everywhere the same and there would not be, in all probability, that bewildering variety of county and township combinations which are to be found to-day. But if one is to attach any significance at all to the social and economic factors which contributed to make the New England town just what it was, it will clearly be appreciated that as those social and economic factors change, and certain of them disappear, the character of the town will change, and maybe even disappear. There can be no one single type of government that is altogether good to the exclusion of all others, and it were folly to attempt to foist a given type upon a community if social and economic factors combine to make it ill-suited. Forms of government simply grow out of a vast "composition of forces,"—if we may borrow a phrase from the physical sciences, and use it as a figure of speech. Some of these forces have already been considered in more or less detail, and it is only necessary to offer a reminder thatthey may be economic, geographic, racial, cultural, social, religious, and what not ? All too frequently the determining factor in the vast composition of forces appears in the shape of arbitrary external authority. The other factors still play their part, their influence cannot ... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.