Civil Government in the United States Considered with Some Reference to Its Origins. Fiske John

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СКАЧАТЬ For what other purposes than those of the town are taxes raised?

      16. Explain the following:—

      a. The poll-tax. b. The tax on personal property, c. The tax on real estate.

      17. What kinds of real estate are exempted from taxation, and why?

      18. What kinds of personal property are exempted, and why?

      19. Where must the several kinds of taxes be assessed and paid? Illustrate.

      20. If a person changes his residence from one town in the state to another before May 1, what consequences about taxes might follow?

      21. How do the assessors ascertain the property for which one should be taxed?

      22. What difficulties beset the taxation of personal property?

      23. Mention a common practice in assigning values to property. What is the effect on the tax-rate? Illustrate.

      24. How do high taxes operate as a burden?

      25. Describe a delusion from which people who directly govern themselves are practically free.

      26. What is the educational value of the town-meeting?

      27. What are by-laws? Explain the phrase.

      28. What of the power and responsibility of selectmen?

      Section 2. Origin of the Township.

      [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 СКАЧАТЬ