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.