It only remains to add that, as an assembly of the whole people becomes impracticable in a large community, so when the population of a township has grown to ten or twelve thousand, the town-meeting is discontinued, the town is incorporated as a city, and its affairs are managed by a mayor, a board of aldermen, and a common council, according to the system adopted in London in the reign of Edward I. In America, therefore, the distinction between cities and towns has nothing to do with the presence or absence of a cathedral, but refers solely to differences in the communal or municipal government.  In the city the common council, as a representative body, replaces (in a certain sense) the town-meeting; a representative government is substituted for a pure democracy.  But the city officers, like the selectmen of towns, are elected annually; and in no case (I believe) has municipal government fallen into the hands of a self-perpetuating body, as it has done in so many instances in England owing to the unwise policy pursued by the Tudors and Stuarts in their grants of charters.

It is only in New England that the township system is to be found in its completeness.  In several southern and western states the administrative unit is the county, and local affairs are managed by county commissioners elected by the people.  Elsewhere we find a mixture of the county and township systems.  In some of the western states settled by New England people, town-meetings are held, though their powers are somewhat less extensive than in New England.  In the settlement of Virginia it was attempted to copy directly the parishes and vestries, boroughs and guilds of England.  But in the southern states generally the great size of the plantations and the wide dispersion of the population hindered the growth of towns, so that it was impossible to have an administrative unit smaller than the county.  As Tocqueville said fifty years ago, “the farther south we go the less active does the business of the township or parish become; the population exercises a less immediate influence on affairs; the power of the elected 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.