and was admitted to the Union, its population was chiefly in the southern half, and composed for the most part of pioneers from Virginia and Virginia’s daughter-state Kentucky.  These men brought with them the old Virginia county system, but with the very great difference that the county officers were not appointed by the governor, or allowed to be a self-perpetuating board, but were elected by the people of the county.  This was a true advance in the democratic direction, but an essential defect of the southern system remained in the absence of any kind of local meeting for the discussion of public affairs and the enactment of local laws.

[Sidenote:  Effects of the Ordinance of 1787.] By the famous Ordinance of 1787, to which we shall again have occasion to refer, negro slavery had been forever prohibited to the north of the Ohio river, so that, in spite of the wishes of her early settlers, Illinois was obliged to enter the Union as a free state.  But in 1820 Missouri was admitted as a slave state, and this turned the stream of southern migration aside from Illinois to Missouri.  These emigrants, to whom slaveholding was a mark of social distinction, preferred to go where they could own slaves.  About the same time settlers from New England and New York, moving along the southern border of Michigan and the northern borders of Ohio and Indiana, began pouring into the northern part of Illinois.  These new-comers did not find the representative county system adequate for their needs, and they demanded township government.  A memorable political struggle ensued between the northern and southern halves of the state, ending in 1848 with the adoption of a new constitution.  It was provided that the legislature should enact a general law for the political organization of townships, under which any county might act whenever a majority of its voters should so determine.[10] This was introducing the principle of local option, and in accordance therewith township governments with town-meetings were at once introduced in the northern counties of the state, while the southern counties kept on in the old way.  Now comes the most interesting part of the story.  The two systems being thus brought into immediate contact in the same state, with free choice between them left to the people, the northern system has slowly but steadily supplanted the southern system, until at the present day only one fifth part of the counties in Illinois remain without township government.

[Footnote 10:  Shaw, Local Government if Illinois, J. H. U. Studies, I., iii.]

[Sidenote:  Intense vitality of the township system.] This example shows the intense vitality of the township system.  It is the kind of government that people are sure to prefer when they have tried it under favourable conditions.  In the West the hostile conditions against which it has to contend are either the recent existence of negro slavery and the ingrained prejudice in favour of the Virginia method, as in Missouri;