At the beginning of his essay on the "Growth of the English
Constitution," Mr. Freeman gives an eloquent account of the May
assemblies of Uri and Appenzell, when the whole people elect their
magistrates for the year and vote upon amendments to the old laws or
upon the adoption of new ones. Such a sight Mr. Freeman seems to think
can be seen nowhere but in Switzerland, and he reckons it among the
highest privileges of his life to have looked upon it. But I am unable
to see in what respect the town-meeting in Massachusetts differs from
the _Landesgemeinde_ or cantonal assembly in Switzerland, save that it
is held in a town-hall and not in the open air, that it is conducted
with somewhat less of pageantry, and that the freemen who attend do not
carry arms even by way of ceremony. In the Swiss assembly, as Mr.
Freeman truly observes, we see exemplified the most democratic phase of
the old Teutonic constitution as described in the "Germania" of
Tacitus, "the earliest picture which history can give us of the
political and social being of our own forefathers." The same remark, in
precisely the same terms, would be true of the town-meetings of New
England. Political institutions, on the White Mountains and on the Alps,
not only closely resemble each other, but are connected by strict bonds
of descent from a common original.
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