Civil Government in the United States Considered with Some Reference to Its Origins Part 17

d. Suffrage as a "safety-valve."

10. The mixture of city politics with those of the state or nation:

a. The degradation of the English borough.

b. The exemption, of London from the Munic.i.p.al Corporations Act.

c. The importance of separate days for munic.i.p.al elections.

d. The importance of abolis.h.i.+ng the "spoils system."

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS AND DIRECTIONS.

(Chiefly for pupils who live in cities.)

1. When was your city organized?

2. Give some account of its growth, its size, and its present population. How many wards has it? Give their boundaries.

In which ward do you live?

3. Examine its charter, and report a few of its leading provisions.

4. What description of government in this chapter comes nearest to that of your city?

5. Consider the suggestions about the study of town government (pp. 43, 44), and act upon such of them as are applicable to city government.

6. What is the general impression about the purity of your city government? (Consult several citizens and report what you find out.)

7. What important caution should be observed about vague rumours of inefficiency or corruption?

8. What are the evidences of a sound financial condition in a city?

9. Is the financial condition of your city sound?

10. When debts are incurred, are provisions made at the same time for meeting them when due?

11. What are "sinking funds"?

12. What wants has a city that a town is free from?

13. Describe your system of public water works, making an a.n.a.lysis of important points that may be presented.

14. Do the same for your park system or any other system that involves a long time for its completion as well as a great outlay.

15. Are the principles of civil service reform recognized in your city?

If so, to what extent? Do they need to be extended further?

16. Describe the parties that contended for the supremacy in your last city election and tell what questions were at issue between them.

17. What great corporations exact an influence in your city affairs? Is such influence bad because it is great? What is a possible danger from such influence?

18. In view of the vast number and range of city interests, what is the most that the average citizen can reasonably be asked to know and to do about them? What things is it indispensable for him to know and to do is he is to contribute to good government?

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.

Section 1. DIRECT AND INDIRECT GOVERNMENT.--The transition from direct to indirect government, as ill.u.s.trated in the gradual development of a towns.h.i.+p into a city, may be profitably studied in Quincy's _Munic.i.p.al History of Boston_, Boston, 1852; and in Winsor's _Memorial History of Boston_, vol. iii. pp. 189-302, Boston, 1881.

Section 2. ORIGIN OF ENGLISH BOROUGHS AND CITIES.--See Loftie's _History of London_, 2 vols., London, 1883; Toulmin Smith's _English Gilds_, with Introduction by Lujo Brentano, London, 1870; and the histories of the English Const.i.tution, especially those of Gneist, Stubbs, Taswell-Langmead, and Hannis Taylor.

Section 3. GOVERNMENT OF CITIES IN THE UNITED STATES.--_J.H.U. Studies_, III., xi.-xii., J.A. Porter, _The City of Was.h.i.+ngton_; IV., iv., W.P.

Holcomb, _Pennsylvania Boroughs_; IV., x., C.H. Lovermore, _Town and City Government of New Haven_; V., i.-ii., Allinson and Penrose, _City Government of Philadelphia_; V., iii., J.M. Bugbee, _The City Government of Boston_; V., iv., M.S. Snow, _The City Government of St. Louis_; VII., ii.-iii., B. Moses, _Establishment of Munic.i.p.al Government in San Francisco_; VII., iv., W.W. Howe, _Munic.i.p.al History of New Orleans_; also _Supplementary Notes_, No. 4, Seth Low, _The Problem of City Government_ (compare No. 1, Albert Shaw, _Munic.i.p.al Government in England_.) See, also, the supplementary volumes published at Baltimore,--Levermore's _Republic of New Haven_, 1886, Allinson and Penrose's _Philadelphia_, 1681-1887: _a History of Munic.i.p.al Development_, 1887.

CHAPTER VI.

THE STATE.

Section 1. _The Colonial Governments._

[Sidenote: Claims of Spain to the possession of North America.]

In the year 1600 Spain was the only European nation which had obtained a foothold upon the part of North America now comprised within the United States. Spain claimed the whole continent on the strength of the bulls of 1493 and 1494, in which Pope Alexander VI. granted her all countries to be discovered to the west of a certain meridian which, happens to pa.s.s a little to the east of Newfoundland. From their first centre in the West Indies the Spaniards had made a lodgment in Florida, at St. Augustine, in 1565; and from Mexico they had in 1605 founded Santa Fe, in what is now the territory of New Mexico.

[Sidenote: Claims of France and England.]

France and England, however, paid little heed to the claim of Spain.

France had her own claim to North America, based on the voyages of discovery made by Verrazano in 1524 and Cartier in 1534, in the course of which New York harbour had been visited and the St. Lawrence partly explored. England had a still earlier claim, based on the discovery of the North American continent in 1497 by John Cabot. It presently became apparent that to make such claims of any value, discovery must be followed up by occupation of the country. Attempts at colonization had been made by French Protestants in Florida in 1562-65, and by the English in North Carolina in 1584-87, but both attempts had failed miserably. Throughout the sixteenth century French and English sailors kept visiting the Newfoundland fisheries, and by the end of the century the French and English governments had their attention definitely turned to the founding of colonies in North America.

[Sidenote: The London and Plymouth Companies.]

In 1606 two great joint-stock companies were formed in England for the purpose of planting such colonies. One of these companies had its headquarters at London, and was called the London Company; the other had its headquarters at the seaport of Plymouth, in Devons.h.i.+re, and was called the Plymouth Company. To the London Company the king granted the coast of North America from 34 to 38 north lat.i.tude; that is, about from Cape Fear to the mouth of the Rappahannock. To the Plymouth Company he granted the coast from 41 to 45; that is, about from the mouth of the Hudson to the eastern extremity of Maine. These grants were to go in straight strips or zones across the continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. Almost nothing was then known about American geography; the distance from ocean to ocean across Mexico was not so very great, and people did not realize that further north it was quite a different thing. As to the middle strip, starting from the coast between the Rappahannock and the Hudson, it was open to the two companies, with the understanding that neither was to plant a colony within 100 miles of any settlement already begun by the other. This meant practically that it was likely to be controlled by whichever company should first come into the field with a flouris.h.i.+ng colony. Accordingly both companies made haste and sent out settlers in 1607, the one to the James River, the other to the Kennebec. The first enterprise, after much suffering, resulted in the founding of Virginia; the second ended in disaster, and it was not until 1620 that the Pilgrims from Leyden made the beginnings of a permanent settlement upon the territory of the Plymouth Company.

[Sidenote: Their common charter.]

These two companies were at first organized under a single charter.

Each was to be governed by a council in England appointed by the king, and these councils were to appoint councils of thirteen to reside in the colonies, with powers practically unlimited. Nevertheless the king covenanted with his colonists as follows: Also we do, for us, our heirs and successors, declare by these presents that all and every the persons, being our subjects, which shall go and inhabit within the said colony and plantation, and every their children and posterity, which shall happen to be born within any of the limits thereof, shall have and enjoy all liberties, franchises, and immunities of free denizens and natural subjects within any of our other dominions, to all intents and purposes as if they had been abiding and born within this our realm of England, or in any other of our dominions. This principle, that British subjects born in America should be ent.i.tled to the same political freedom as if born in England, was one upon which the colonists always insisted, and it was the repeated and persistent attempts of George III. to infringe it that led the American colonies to revolt and declare themselves independent of Great Britain.

[Sidenote: Dissolution of the two companies.]

[Sidenote: Settlement of the three zones.]

Both the companies founded in 1606 were short-lived. In 1620 the Plymouth Company got a new charter, which made it independent of the London Company. In 1624 the king, James I., quarreled with the London Company, brought suit against it in court, and obtained from the subservient judges a decree annulling its charter. In 1635 the reorganized Plymouth Company surrendered its charter to Charles I.

in pursuance of a bargain which need not here concern us.[1] But the creation of these short-lived companies left an abiding impression upon the map of North America and upon the organization of civil government in the United States. Let us observe what was done with the three strips or zones into which the country was divided: the northern or New England zone, a.s.signed to the Plymouth Company; the southern or Virginia zone, a.s.signed to the London Company; and the central zone, for which the two companies were, so to speak, to run a race.

[Footnote 1: See my _Beginnings of New England_, p. 112.]

[Sidenote: 1. the northern zone.]

[Sidenote: 2. The southern zone.]

In 1663 Charles II. cut off the southern part of Virginia, the area covering the present states of North and South Carolina and Georgia, and it was formed into a new province called Carolina. In 1729 the two groups of settlements which had grown up along its coast were definitively separated into North and South Carolina; and in 1732 the frontier portion toward Florida was organized into the colony of Georgia. Thus four of the original thirteen states--Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia--were const.i.tuted in the southern zone.

To this group some writers add Maryland, founded in 1632, because its territory had been claimed by the London Company; but the earliest settlements in Maryland, its princ.i.p.al towns, and almost the whole of its territory, come north of lat.i.tude 38 and within the middle zone.

[Sidenote: 3. The middle zone.]