or simply the sparseness of population, as in Nebraska.  Time will evidently remove the latter obstacle, and probably the former also.  It is very significant that in Missouri, which began so lately as 1879 to erect township governments under a local option law similar to that of Illinois, the process has already extended over about one sixth part of the state; and in Nebraska, where the same process began in 1883, it has covered nearly one third of the organized counties of the state.

[Sidenote:  County option and township option.] The principle of local option as to government has been carried still farther in Minnesota and Dakota.  The method just described may be called county option; the question is decided by a majority vote of the people of the county.  But in Minnesota in 1878 it was enacted that as soon as any one of the little square townships in that state should contain as many as twenty-five legal voters, it might petition the board of county commissioners and obtain a township organization, even though, the adjacent townships in the same county should remain under county government only.  Five years later the same provision was adopted by Dakota, and under it township government is steadily spreading.

[Sidenote:  Grades of township government.] Two distinct grades of township government are to be observed in the states west of the Alleghanies; the one has the town-meeting for deliberative purposes, the other has not.  In Ohio and Indiana, which derived their local institutions largely from Pennsylvania, there is no such town-meeting, the administrative offices are more or less concentrated in a board of trustees, and the town is quite subordinate to the county.  The principal features of this system have been reproduced in Iowa, Missouri, and Kansas.

The other system, was that which we have seen beginning in Michigan, under the influence of New York and New England.  Here the town-meeting, with legislative powers, is always present.  The most noticeable feature of the Michigan system is the relation between township and county, which was taken from New York.  The county board is composed of the supervisors of the several townships, and thus represents the townships.  It is the same in Illinois.  It is held by some writers that this is the most perfect form of local government,[11] but on the other hand the objection is made that county boards thus constituted are too large.[12] We have seen that in the states in question there are not less than 16, and sometimes more than 20, townships in each county.  In a board of 16 or 20 members it is hard to fasten responsibility upon anybody in particular; and thus it becomes possible to have “combinations,” and to indulge in that exchange of favours known as “log-rolling,” which is one of the besetting sins of all large representative bodies.  Responsibility is more concentrated in the smaller county boards of Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.