As we have already observed, the westward movement of population in the United States has largely followed the parallels of latitude, and thus the characteristics of these three original strips or zones have, with more or less modification, extended westward.  The men of New England, with their Portland and Salem reproduced more than 3000 miles distant in the state of Oregon, and within 100 miles of the Pacific Ocean, may be said in a certain sense to have realized literally the substance of King James’s grant to the Plymouth Company.  It will be noticed that the kinds of local government described in our earlier chapters are characteristic respectively of the three original zones:  the township system being exemplified chiefly in the northern zone, the county system in the southern zone, and the mixed township-county system in the central zone.

[Sidenote:  House of Burgesses in Virginia.] The London and Plymouth companies did not perish until after state governments had been organized in the colonies already founded upon their territories.  In 1619 the colonists of Virginia, with the aid of the more liberal spirits in the London Company, secured for themselves a representative government; to the governor and his council, appointed in England, there was added a general assembly composed of two burgesses from each “plantation,” [2] elected by the inhabitants.  This assembly, the first legislative body that ever sat in America, met on the 30th of July, 1619, in the choir of the rude church at Jamestown.  The dignity of the burgesses was preserved, as in the House of Commons, by sitting with their hats on; and after offering prayer, and taking the oath of allegiance and supremacy, they proceeded to enact a number of laws relating to public worship, to agriculture, and to intercourse with the Indians.  Curiously enough, so confident was the belief of the settlers that they were founding towns, that they called their representatives “burgesses,” and down to 1776 the assembly continued to be known as the House of “Burgesses,” although towns refused to grow in Virginia, and soon after counties were organized in 1634 the burgesses sat for counties.  Such were the beginnings of representative government in Virginia.

[Footnote 2:  The word “plantation” is here used, not in its later and ordinary sense, as the estate belonging to an individual planter, but in an earlier sense.  In this early usage it was equivalent to “settlement.”  It was used in New England as well as in Virginia; thus Salem was spoken of by the court of assistants in 1629 as “New England’s Plantation.”]