[Sidenote:  Small farms.] Most of the people lived on small farms, each family raising but little more than enough food for its own support; and the small size of the farms made it possible to have a good many in a compact neighbourhood.  It appeared also that towns could be more easily defended against the Indians than scattered plantations; and this doubtless helped to keep people together, although if there had been any strong inducement for solitary pioneers to plunge into the great woods, as in later years so often happened at the West, it is not likely that any dread of the savages would have hindered them.

[Sidenote:  Township and village.] [Sidenote:  Social positions of settlers.] Thus the early settlers of New England came to live in townships.  A township would consist of about as many farms as could be disposed within convenient distance from the meeting-house, where all the inhabitants, young and old, gathered every Sunday, coming on horseback or afoot.  The meeting-house was thus centrally situated, and near it was the town pasture or “common,” with the school-house and the block-house, or rude fortress for defence against the Indians.  For the latter building some commanding position was apt to be selected, and hence we so often find the old village streets of New England running along elevated ridges or climbing over beetling hilltops.  Around the meeting-house and common the dwellings gradually clustered into a village, and after a while the tavern, store, and town-house made their appearance.

Among the people who thus tilled the farms and built up the villages of New England, the differences in what we should call social position, though noticeable, were not extreme.  While in England some had been esquires or country magistrates, or “lords of the manor,”—­a phrase which does not mean a member of the peerage, but a landed proprietor with dependent tenants[1]; some had been yeomen, or persons holding farms by some free kind of tenure; some had been artisans or tradesmen in cities.  All had for many generations been more or less accustomed to self-government and to public meetings for discussing local affairs.  That self-government, especially as far as church matters were concerned, they were stoutly bent upon maintaining and extending.  Indeed, that was what they had crossed the ocean for.  Under these circumstances they developed a kind of government which we may describe in the present tense, for its methods are pretty much the same to-day that they were two centuries ago.

[Footnote 1:  Compare the Scottish “laird.”]

[Sidenote:  The town-meeting.] In a New England township the people directly govern themselves; the government is the people, or, to speak with entire precision, it is all the male inhabitants of one-and-twenty years of age and upwards.  The people tax themselves.  Once each year, usually in March but sometimes as early as February or as late as April, a “town-meeting” is held, at which all the grown men of the township are expected to be present and to vote, while any one may introduce motions or take part in the discussion.  In early times there was a fine for non-attendance, but at is no longer the case; it is supposed that a due regard to his own interests will induce every man to come.