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. THE ORIGIN OF LOCAL GOVERNMENTS. The Source of our Local Governments. — The systems of local government which have been described did not spring up spontaneously, nor were they established arbitrarily. There are reasons to be found in the history of their origins which explain many of their details. We shall now see how local government grew in the colonies, for here we have the beginnings of the systems that are in operation to-day. Everywhere in the colonies the English settlers adapted to their new environment the ancient customs of the mother-country. Differences in physical geography, and in the character and motives of the colonists, caused differences in the resulting local governments. This fact is best illustrated by an account of what took place in New England and in Virginia. The Method of Settlement in New England. — These colonies were settled by emigrants who came, in the main, from the same classes of Englishmen. The NewEnglanders, however, were Puritans. The church and its services were a very important part of their daily lives. The requirement of church attendance was one reason for grouping their homes near the meeting-house. Moreover, the regionin which they settled had a stony soil, difficult to cultivate. Their farms required careful cultivation, and therefore could not be very large. The New Englander was content to live near the coast. Access to the interior was not easy, for the rivers, with few exceptions, were short and rapid. The sea fisheries tempted the settlers to remain near the coast, and fishing, with ship-building and commerce, became their important industries. Town Meeting and Officers. — For these reasons New England was a region of small farms and towns, and the local government which grew up was adapted to these con...