Nothing could be more unlike the jagged, irregular shape of counties in Virginia or townships in Massachusetts, which grew up just as it happened.  The contrast is similar to that between Chicago, with its straight streets crossing at right angles, and Boston, or London, with their labyrinths of crooked lanes.  For picturesqueness the advantage is entirely with the irregular city, but for practical convenience it is quite the other way.  So with our western lands the simplicity and regularity of the system have made it a marvel of convenience for the settlers, and doubtless have had much to do with the rapidity with which civil governments have been built up in the West.  “This fact,” says a recent writer, “will be appreciated by those who know from experience the ease and certainty with which the pioneer on the great plains of Kansas, Nebraska, or Dakota is enabled to select his homestead or ‘locate his claim’ unaided by the expensive skill of the surveyor.” [8]

[Footnote 8:  Howard, Local Const.  Hist. of U. S., vol. i. p. 139.]

[Sidenote:  Some effects of the system.] There was more in it than this, however.  There was a germ of organization planted in these western townships, which must be noted as of great importance.  Each township, being six miles in length and six miles in breadth, was divided into thirty-six numbered sections, each containing just one square mile, or 640 acres.  Each section, moreover, was divided into 16 tracts of 40 acres each, and sales to settlers were and are generally made by tracts at the rate of a dollar and a quarter per acre.  For fifty dollars a man may buy forty acres of unsettled land, provided he will actually go and settle upon it, and this has proved to be a very effective inducement for enterprising young men to “go West.”  Many a tract thus bought for fifty dollars has turned out to be a soil upon which princely fortunes have grown.  A tract of forty acres represents to-day in Chicago or Minneapolis an amount of wealth difficult for the imagination to grasp.

[Sidenote:  The reservation for public schools.] [Sidenote:  In this reservation there were the germs of township government.] But in each of these townships there was at least one section which was set apart for a special purpose.  This was usually the sixteenth section, nearly in the centre of the township; and sometimes the thirty-sixth section, in the southeast corner, was also reserved.  These reservations were for the support of public schools.  Whatever money was earned, by selling the land or otherwise, in these sections, was to be devoted to school purposes.  This was a most remarkable provision.  No other nation has ever made a gift for schools on so magnificent a scale.  We have good reason for taking pride in such a liberal provision.  But we ought not to forget that all national gifts really involve taxation, and this is no exception to the rule, although in this case it is not a taking of money,